75

THE CONCEPT OF “TEACHABILITY”

Nigel Tubbs
School of Education
King Alfred’s College

The single individual can mean the most unique of all, and the single individual can mean
everyone.’
INTRODUCTION
Much is made in educational theory of the desirability for teachers also to be
learners. There is general and often uncritical acceptance that the power of the
teacher should be mediated in some way by a process of reflection in which the
teacher is open to learning from others and from viewpoints other than his or her
own. Postmodernism and critical theory share this outlook. The former is character-
ized by a radical ”undecidability,”2 where possibility (according to Gert Biesta3)
requires us always to remain open to what has not yet arrived. Teachers are to
suspend definitive judgments in the classroom and pay less attention to knowing
what is and more to releasing “the awareness that every discourse, cultural forma-
tion, or sociopolitical order is positional and arbitrary (and]manifested in exclusions
or assimilation^."^ Critical pedagogy seeks for its practitioners a similar openness to
learning. Nicholas Burbules, for example, gives his support to a notion of dialogue in
teaching that ”represents a continuous, developmental, communicative inter-
change through which we stand to gain a fuller apprehension of the world, ourselves
and one another,” and is careful to insist on “reciprocal teaching’’ where meaning
and value are ”openly neg~tiated.”~
We might summarize this consensus by saying that such educational theorists
consider it necessary that teachers be able-to-teach but are also themselves “teach-
able.” “Teachability” here encompasses the self-critical activity advocated within
reflective practice, postmodern pedagogy, and critical pedagogy. It acknowledges the
dialectical/dialogical relations between teacher and taught, and it speaks for the
openness of the teacher’s relation to the other and against closure in the name of
dogma or metanarrative. Teachability could as much underpin pedagogical models
grounded in Jurgen Habermas’s emancipatory interest as in Michel Foucault’s
archaeology and genealogy of subjugated voices. It may also characterize Immanuel
Kant‘s desire for release from self-incurred tutelage and for shouldering the burden

1. Seren Kierkegaard, The Point of V i e w (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 115
2. Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching Positions (New York Teachers College Press, 19971, 17
3. See Gert J.J. Biesta, ”Say You Want a Revolution ...Suggestions for the Impossible Future of Critical
Pedagogy,“ Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998):499-510.
4. William V. Spanos, The End of Education (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19931, 164.
5. Nicholas C. Burbules, Dialogue in Teaching (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 10, 13.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Winter 2003 / Volume 53 / Number 1

0 2003 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois
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and struggle of reason. ”Teachability” here can refer to the autonomy implicit in
learning from ourselves, being both teachable and able-to-teach.
The common thread in these examples is that the reflexivity demanded in being
teachable has at its core the experienceof contingency, determinateness, situatedness,
and historicity. In critical pedagogy this contingency is understood as determination
within an ideological framework that reproduces existing social inequalities pro-
duced within the capitalist mode of production. “Teachability” here invokes
revolutionary practice to see through and overcome that domination. In postmodem
theorizing situatedness is seen to lie within the text, a pure contingency for which
nothing transcends its context. Here “teachability” is the realization of determina-
tion as a local event with only local significance. Not only is this a liberation from
absolutist and transcendental grand narratives; it is a pedagogy for the release of
previously repressed voices.
That “teachability” can cover the modem, the critical, the hermeneutical, and
the postmodem, as well as an inner reflexivity and an external communicative
pedagogy, is illustrative of the lack of philosophical rigor surrounding the dialectic
of “the teacher who learns.” In this essay I argue that ”teachability” is a concept that
eschews being incorporated into any of these perspectives within education; it is a
speculative concept that has for its form and content the absolute. Its dialectical
movement and speculative significance are misrecognized when the illusory nature
of its constitutive moments is suppressed. Critical pedagogy abstracts freedom from
its local conditions of possibility, clothes it inuniversality, and returns it to the local
as domination. Postmodern pedagogy fixes the particular and abstracts it from its
universal conditions of possibility. This practice is also a form of domination, in this
case over the educational import of thinking as self-development and as freedom.
Comprehended speculatively , the concept of “teachability” renders nugatory the
bases of critical pedagogy and postmodern theorizing in education.
What the speculative concept of “teachability” teaches is that contingency
contains illusions that entrap its supporters into forms of natural law theorizing,
particularly and cruelly when they have set themselves against exactly that. To be
teachable about contingency requires more than an experience of social determina-
tion, for the experience itself generates illusions about the significance and meaning
of the experience. We will examine this process using categories from G.W.F. Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic.6 In particular, the master/slave
relation in Hegel’s Phenomenology is one of the most remarkable educational
processes available in the Western philosophical tradition.‘ In advance of our
6. See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1977).
This book will be cited as PS in the text for all subsequent references. See also G.W.F. Hegel, Science of
Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (London: George Allen and Unwin, 19691.
7. A more detailed examination of the master/slave relation as an exemplar of the teacher/student relation
can be found in Nigel Tubbs, Contradiction of Enlightenment:Hegel and the Broken Middle (Aldershot,
England: Ashgate, 1997).

NIGEL TUBBS is Head of Education Studies at King Alfred‘s College, Winchester SO22 4NR England. His
primary areas of scholarship are European philosophy and education.
TUBBS The Concept of “Teachability” 77

analysis, we can say that the comprehension of contingency requires a phenomeno-

logical awareness and scientific retrieval of the way that contingency is always ”I”
as the misrecognition of absolute nothingness or death. Contingency is foundational,
but the foundation is its own misrecognition of itself. This necessity, this absolute,
is the subject and substance of teachability.
As such, the method of critique underpinning this essay is a speculative retrieval
of the educational significance of a contingency whose singularity as the learning
individual is suppressed by the illusions of modern subjective freedom. This critique
applies as much to work within the revolutionary tradition as to postmodern work
that asserts the immediacy of difference. The argument that follows, then, exposes
some of the presuppositions that ground the concepts of ”contingency” and prede-
termine the critique of various theoretical perspectives in education and beyond.
“Teachability” as a philosophical concept demands that we doubt our critical
awareness (PauloFreire), our skepticism (Zygmunt Bauman), and our mourning the
loss of the absolute (Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish).
Summing up the differencesbetween mere critique and “self-perficient” philosophi-
cal doubt, and offering an overall statement of the work that the essay undertakes,
Gillian Rose, writing of Hegel, reminds us that
To subject ”so-called natural representations” to doubt is still to presuppose that those
representations are natural, but this is precisely what should be doubted. It is not a matter of re-
establishing the validity of those representations on one’s own conviction, but of a despair which
questions representation as such, and which seeks ”conscious insight into the untruth of
phenomenal knowledge,” into the ”so-called” naturalness of the representation.. ..This path is
self-perficient, self-completing,because it is more radical than mere doubt [and]contains the
criterion of its untruth in itself.*
So, working with the difficulties of speculative method and the aporetic nature
of Hegelian phenomenology, how might we explore the concept of “teachability”?
Can we, to paraphrase Nietzsche, cut into ourselves as teachers and learners more
deeply than the reflective models that are currently available to us? As I will
demonstrate in t h s essay, I believe we can. I will do so first by outlining the
speculative nature of the master/slave relation in Hegel’s Phenomenology and then
by using that relation to critique the misrecognition of teachability in three other
works: Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Bauman’s Intimations of Post-moder-
nity, and Blake et al.’s Thinking Again: Education After Post-modernism.’
THELEARNING
INDMDUAL
The teachability of the learning individual can be comprehended philosophi-
cally as the self-educative relation of the master and the slave. What is so often
missed in readings of the master/slave relation is that it describes the phenomenol-
ogy of contingency and, therein, is an exemplar of the concept of ”teachability.”
Spirit in Hegel is that phenomenology of contingency, but unlike postmodern
8. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London:Athlone, 19811, 153.
9. Paul0 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (NewYork: Penguin, 1990).This book will be cited as PO in the
text for all subsequent references. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London:Routledge,
1992).This book will be cited as 1P in the text for all subsequent references. Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers,
Richard Smith, andPaul Standish, ThinkingAguin:Education After Post-modernism (Westport:Bergin and
Gamey, 1998).This book will be cited as T A in the text for all subsequent references.
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skepticism and revolutionary praxis, spirit is aware that contingency is always also
determined by existing social and political relations and property law, and this
awareness is already its misrecognition and self-determination.This “awareness” is
already the self-determination of spirit as and within teachability.
In the phenomenology of spirit, contingency is known through the experience of
its contradictory otherness to that for which it appears as illusory being. Spirit in
Hegel is the “I” and the “We,” not in some abstract unification or mutuality, but held
together and apart in the necessity of misrecognition (property law) that must
prefigure the appearance of contingency as other or as object. As we will see in a
moment, notions of reconciliation, such as praxis and intersubjectivity, are only
cultures of misrecognition that lack any idea of themselves as cultures - that is, as
representations of the absolute and of freedom. “Teachability” as a philosophical
concept is spiritual in nature (I intend the contradiction here), for it is open to
learning about contingency from the contradictory necessity of contingency, a
necessity that has its actuality in and as the learning individual.
Indeed, there is a fundamental truth here. Contingency is itself determined, or
is contingent, and property law in Hegelian philosophy is always both the form of
contingency as experience and its content. Only the philosophical re-cognition of
contingency as law can avoid new forms of domination of contingency, that is, new
forms of ”natural law” theorizing. As we will see in the following discussion, critical
pedagogy, postmodern skepticism, and authentic subjectivity are just such forms of
domination: reflective perspectives that deny the contingency of contingency by
asserting (unwittingly)reflective forms of natural law, or what Hegel calls illusory
being.
Teachability as the self-determination of contingency appears as the beginning
and the end of the life-and-death struggle that is itself the determination of the
individual ”I.” When immediate natural consciousness seeks to assert its indepen-
dence, it must do so by trying to prove its nonrelation to anything else, either to life
or to other such immediacies that face it. However, the attempt to prove indepen-
dence is contradictory on two counts: it is already dependent on life itself, and it is
dependent upon the appearance of the other, In other words, the struggle for
independence is self-contradictory, for it is already in-dependence or contingency.
Even though the risk that natural consciousness takes “does away with the truth
that was supposed to issue from it” (PS, 114),nevertheless a great deal is learned that
was unanticipated. First, natural consciousness becomes aware of its own individu-
ality, not as life but as something dependent upon life. Its terrifying experience is that
it realizes that it consists of nothing that ”could not be regarded as a vanishing
moment” (PS, 114).It learns that, in life, it is absolutely contingent. Second, it learns
that this nothingness is exactly how it judged the other that it wanted to make
vanish. In the struggle they share a negative relation -that the truth of each is not
independence but being in-dependence. This contingency is the genealogy of politi-
cal freedom, but the result of the struggle is very different from the truth of the
mutual negativity experienced in and as the truth of the struggle. If both had died,
TUBBS The Concept of “Teachability” 79

then their being in-dependence (their negativity) would be absolute and mutual, as
well as natural. But those who survive the struggle learn something else. They no
longer need the other, or the risk, to prove their independence, for now philosophical
consciousness has the “death” of natural consciousness as its own self-formative
experience. Contingency is formative of the person but is not now the content of the
person. Contingency known is not contingency; it is the “1” who has survived the
absolute nothingness of death and now has death or contingency as other. Further,
since the person is also the truth of other such persons, all “relation,” all “mutuality”
(theirbeing in-dependence) is eradicated.’OThis misrecognition of contingency is the
beginning of social relations, but also, as misrecognition, it is the standpoint of
natural law. To restore the relation of in-dependence, notions such as praxis,
intersubjectivity, and authentic subjectivity have to be created to try and rework the
negative relation that was part of the struggle. But the very project of restoration
already presupposes the standpoint of natural law. The “I” that reflects upon broken
social relations is already the misrecognition, the knowing, of contingency. The
conditions of the possibility of mutual recognition are already those of the possibility
of persons. Contingency known is contingency as other for the knower. The
conditions of the possibility of contingency are aporetic, but they are unavoidable
and total.
In the Phenomenology Hegel uses the relation of the master and the slave to
describe the misrecognition of the (newlyindependent] individual who is no longer
identified by a relation of risk and struggle. The master is separated from all others.
He is the new naturalized philosophical consciousness, the newly educated and
therefore independent individual. Dependency is other, or object, to the master.
Independence, or the ”I,” is therefore already property relations. Property relations
are the misrecognition of dependency, or Contingency, as other.
The slave is no such person at all. As near to negativity as it is possible to get
while still alive, his is the degradation of being the other to the ”I” -a mere object,
pure dependence. But, as is well rehearsed, if we remember the risk and struggle in
which the master learned of himself, then we know that the truth of the master lies
in his dependence and that his independence is only a “naturalized” form of the
contingent ”I.” It is the slave who is the real truth of the master. The slave has this
truth as his own in two ways. First, he is the experience of absolute vanishing or pure
contingency, knowing that literally he is nothing except dependence upon the
master. Second, in all of his work for the master, he lives out his own truth: being
nothing in theory and in practice. The slave therefore gains ”a mind of his own”
where contingency is both form and content (PS, 119).
How, then, can this nothing of the slave become something positive when it is
already the presupposition of the something for which it is nothing? How, against
existing property relations, can that which is necessary as other for the “I” become
something that is “I” or not other? This individual, because he has contingency as
10. I am trying to emphasize that readings of the master/slave relation as “mutual recognition,” such as are
found below in Blake et al., are wrong. Mutual recognition is not available to self-consciousnesswhich,
politically, is already “independent.”
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other, is also and therefore contingency in and for itself, for his independence is
dependent. This is not a matter of the slave overcoming the master -anything but.
It is the master knowing contingency as himself. Because he is master, he has death
or absolute vanishing as other, and yet, as master, he has dependency in himself. Here
contingencyis known as not known by itself- this is contingency’s own truth. This
individual is master and slave, able-to-teach and teachable, and is the actuality of
contingency that is not suppressed by illusions of natural law that regard otherness
as purely other. This relation, where relation to self is relation to otherness, is known
philosophicallyas the absolute and lived spiritually as misrecognition.The absolute
in Hegel is not the overcoming of contingency; it is the truth of contingency.Denials
that contingency can be absolute are only so much more retreat into the presuppo-
sitions of natural law that has death as “other.” Only in the teachability of themaster
as slave does contingency have a mind of its own, as a learning individual.
With this speculativepresentation of the master/slave relation as teachability in
mind, we can now begin to critique some of the misrecognitions of teachability in
educational theory.
REVOLUTIONARY
PRAXIS
The following statement from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed encapsulates
the model of teacher teachability as praxis: “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-
students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges:
teacher-student with students-teachers” (PO,53).It offers aunification of theory and
practice that overcomes their separation in and by modem abstract instrumental
reason. However, this new term, based as it is on Freire’s merely partial reading of
Hegel’s master/slave relation, results in the suppression of the educational signifi-
cance of that relation.
The teachability of the teacher/student becomes apparent in reading Hegel
against Freire. In Pedagogy of the oppressed Freire refers several times to Hegel’s
relation of master and slave (PS, 111-1 19).He repeats Hegel’s observation that “it is
only through staking one’s life that freedom is won” (PS, 114; PO, 16).Also, contra
idealism, Freire argues that the realization by the oppressed of their antithetical
relation to the oppressors does not “in itself constitute liberation” (PO,26). Freire
quotes Hegel here on the separation of master and slave: “one is the independent
consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent
consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live for another. The former is
lord, the other is bondsman” IPS, 115).Finally, Freire compares the alienation of
students to that of the slave but says that, unlike the slave, ”they never discover that
they educate the teacher” (PO, 46). This becomes, then, the central motif of the
whole of Pedagogyofthe Oppressed: “Educationmust begin with the solution of the
teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction SO that
both are simultaneously teachers and students” (PO,46), or teachable.
This account is a partial reading of Hegel on several points. First, the risk that
immediate natural consciousness takes for its independence is prior to the master/
slave relation, which is themisrecognition of that experience.The risk refers to alife-
TUBBS The ConceDt of ”Teachabilitv” 81

and-death struggle in which the individual learns of his or her own negative
universality- that is, that without attachment to life, he or she is nothing. Without
this terrifying experience of negative universality, consciousness is not “I,,; yet, in
this experience of negative universality, consciousness is “not-I.” The “free”
relation that the individual wins in risking independence from life, or the result of
the experience, is not freedom as it was first supposed. Indeed, as Hegel says, “this
trial by death does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it” (PS,
114). The life-and-death struggle is the necessary precursor to the struggle for
freedom, but its truth must reappear again and again, negatively, as property
relations. This is the spiritual significance of the master/slave relation.”
Second, Freire forces a dogmatic, or ”natural law,” notion of liberation onto the
relation of master and slave. This notion does not take account of the universality
of negativity that is already the aporetic foundation of their relation. Realizing
oppression does not constitute liberation when liberation is posited as “solving the
contradiction” in which universality appears. But there is a re-education about the
illusions that underpin such notions of liberation - an education Hegel calls re-
cognition. It is precisely the educational significance of re-cognition that Freire
suppresses in his version of the master/slave and teacher/student relations.
Third, although the slave is the education of the master, the master still has the
slave as other. Contingency has no truth if it is not itself dependent. It is in the
negative universality of the slave that the slave is master and the master is slave, or
where the learner learns of himself, from himself, in relation to other as to self. It is
a truth that exists within the relation, not one that eradicates or overcomes the
relation. The “solution” to the master/slave relation is not found within the master/
slave relation. “Reconciliation” is a repressive notion because it is heteronomous to
the relation itself, or to the actuality of contingency.
Fourth, Freire is right to imply that, just as the result of the master/slave relation
is a person who is master and slave, so the result of education is a person who is
teacher and student. But if such a person overcame that relation - that is, if this
person “solved” the contradiction of the relation, as Freire states - then the
Phenomenology of Spirit would not have been a phenomenology. It would not have
been a chronicle of the continuing misrecognition of the relation by itself in various
forms of “personhood,” nor its re-cognition by philosophical consciousness. Equally
important, if the person who is teacher and student overcomes or solves the
contradiction of therelation, then there is an end of education. It is futile at this point
for Freire or critical theorists to appeal to the implicit “negativity” of the “teacher-
student” as someone who “keeps learning,‘’ for the damage has already been done.

11. This is not the place to argue the case for a hfferent definition of the “philosophy of education.” In his
recent review of Philosophers on Education (published in [ournal of Philosophy of Education 33, no. 3
[1999]:485-5001, John White asked if there has in fact been a continuous historical project called “the
philosophy of education” in the West. The question already separates philosophy of education and history,
suppressing the educational journey of misrecognition that constitutes the philosophy of history. For
speculative philosophy, the life-and-deathstruggledescribedin this essay is the necessity of phdosophy and
education - a necessity made possible in its speculative representation of the master/slave and teacher/
student. This philosophy of education is immanent, and, speculatively speaking, it is history.
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It is precisely the universality of negativity, learned in the life-and-death struggle,

which aperson (the“new term” of teacher and student)has overcome. The “learner,”
posited as nondogmatic because he is a learner, is still a concept of natural law or of
a reflection that has other as nothing. This learner is still master, even though hidden
behind the universality of contingency that appears as universal property rights and
subjective freedom.
As the life-and-death struggle did not produce the truth that was supposed to
issue from it, so now the master/slave relation and the teacher/student relation
repeat the same fundamental problem. The truth that issues from the relation is
negative and is educational in this sense: All models that try to turn this negative
universality into a positiveovercomingor, interestingly, into apositivenonovercoming
(namely, postmodemity) suppress both the truth of the relation and what has
actually been learned. What is learned within the relation are the various ways in
which the relation gives rise to illusions that allow us to posit ourselves free from the
universality that claims us. This necessity does not offer alternatives to those
illusions, but it does provide for re-cognition and learning about their continued
domination of freedom.Freire’s model of the teacher who is a student and the student
who is a teacher - a model that, in his own words, solves their contradiction - is
just such a suppression of negative universality. Its resolution is the victory of
illusion over difficulty, or another victory of natural law over the aporia of philo-
sophical consciousness.
BOURGEOISSKEPTICISM
If postmodernistsshareJean-FranCoisLyotard’s incredulitytowardmetanarratives
then, despite the manifold directions in which this incredulity takes them, and
despite the fact that this incredulity is “reflexive”to the extent that the postmodern
subject or author is an oxymoron - despite all such disavowing of the difficulty of
actuality, we can perhaps say that they share a skepticism toward totality and
totalizing perspectives.12However, a speculative analysis shows that skepticism (or
skeptical incredulity), like praxis, is also a particular misrecognition of the master/
slaverelationand therein anotherform or culture of property relationsor misrecognized
freedom.
Using Hegelian philosophy as our speculative guide, we can argue that the
skeptical “1” is indifferent to content -that is, it is indifferentto its genealogy in the
life-and-death struggle and has all content as other to its own indifference. This
indifferenceis the reason for the popularity of ”culture” as a concept in postmodern
theorizing. Culture has become defined as the self-experience of indifference, or as
indifference. Whereas culture as art or religion represented the lack of freedom as
content, now postmodern skepticism represents freedom as the lack of content.
Culture itself has no significance for us. Its content can be anything. As such, it is the
pure form of indifference: form without content, containing “no permanent ele-
ment” and having its freedom in “the flux of all that would stand before it” (PS, 124).

12. See Jean-FrangoisLyotard, The Postmodern Condition:AReport on Knowledge (Manchester:Manchester

University Press, 1979).
TDBS The Concept of “Teachability” 83

Skepticism as culture gives the illusion that it does justice to contingency. In

fact, it suppresses contingency. Postmodern skepticism “reflects” bourgeois prop-
erty relations and actively suppresses the significance of the subject as any kind of
substance other than that for whom (internal)freedom is domination over all things
and no-things. Here postmodernism is only the Janus face of universal property
relations, Rose has recently called it “despairing rationalism without reason”:13
despairing because its freedom is “a perpetually self-engendered disorder...[and]
restless confusion” (PS, 125);rationalism because it is work or thought universalized
as form; and without reason because culture itself is now a contentless representa-
tion and without significance or substance, without relations of self-determination
or development. The fate of postmodern skepticism is therefore an unintended
methodologism, where skepticism becomes freedom from freedom. Postmodern
theorizing consists of ingenious and disingenuous ”methods” that, in asserting law
as arbitrary power and expressing this critique as deconstructive of such dogmas,
render opaque the violence of their own “reflective” positing. The appearance of
skepticism as a critique of all method, of all transcendental methodologicalpresup-
positions, is in fact the victory of method as a universal form. Culture and method
become the same abstraction - that is, the total abstraction of form from content.
In such skepticism, that which is posited as unknowable (the absolute) is already
presupposed as other by a consciousness that misses the significance of this
determination or relation for it. The positing of culture as contingencyand implicitly
as a critique of all absolute standpoints is the highest form of self-representation
achieved by abstract thinking. The victory of method is precisely the skepticism that
the absolute cannot be known. The victory of method in its postmodem form is no
more than a repetition of unfree bourgeois social relations, for skepticism in this
formulationis the indifferenceof themaster towardall“others.”Together, postmodern
skepticism and universal property law are the story of the master/slave relation, or
the “I,” when ’“metaphysics’ is barred from ethic^."'^
Bauman’s postmodem theorizing illustrates this totalizing of indifference as
method. Modernity, he argues, “began as a war against mystery and magic” intended
to assert the independence of reason (IP, x).Underlying this project was the fear of
a world without foundation, a fear that resulted in the imposition of rational order
upon a world with many different, perhaps incommensurable, forms of “order” or
meaning. He states,
the kind of society that, retrospectively, came to be called modem, emerged out of the discovery
that.. .human order is vulnerable, contingent and devoid of reliable foundations. That discovery
was shocking.The response to the shock was a dream and an effort to make order solid, obligatory
and reliably founded (10,xiJ.
But this response is true of the philosophy of history as a whole! Culture is always
the representative of negative universality as illusion or as social and political
relations. Bauman’s point is that, with the end of religion, reason itself becomes
culture as form ”and“ content, but his interpretation misses the significance of the

13. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law [Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 19961, 7
14. Ibid.
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relation between natural and philosophical consciousness.He is right that the mod-
em emerged out of the unhappy consciousness, but modem rational consciousness
is both the recognition that the unhappy consciousness is a mind of its own and a
misrecognition of this mind in its social and political appearance. Modern reason is
the slave’smind of his own in its bourgeoismanifestation as subjectivefreedom. This
master is vulnerability misrecognized as the independent ”I” whose universal indif-
ference [toeverything, everyone, and no-thing)is precisely his bourgeois legal status.
When Bauman argues that the modem is a response to vulnerability, he
misunderstands that the modem i s vulnerability, and contingency, and is actual
because vulnerability and contingency are self-determining. Bauman’s misunder-
standing of modernity leadshim to proffersomething that is ”postmodern,” abstract-
ing vulnerability and contingency from its actuality - that is, from our self-
determination or (our lack of)freedom - and locating it elsewhere. In a potentially
speculative insight, Bauman explores this “elsewhere” as “modernity for itself,I’ or
“as modernity conscious of its true nature” [IP, 187).Here modernity is potentially
teachable. If the aporia of freedom is pursued as the positing and self-determination
of the modem bourgeois person, and if the illusions of indifference are re-cognized
as determinative of our philosophical consciousness in which the absolute is
realized, then modernity for itself can be a teaching of itself by itself. Bauman chooses
a different path, however, when he describes postmodemity as
a self-reproducing,pragmatically self-sustainableand logically self-containedsocial condition
defined by distinctive features of its own. A theory of post-modemity therefore cannot be a
modifiedtheory of modernity, a theory of modernity with a set of negativemarkers.An adequate
theory of post-modernitymay only be construed in a cognitive space organisedby a different set
of assumptions;it needs its own vocabulary.The degree of emancipationfrom the concepts and
issues spawnedby the discourse ofmodernity ought to serve as a measure of the adequacyof such
a theory (IP,188).
Here is rampant methodologism: Bauman abstracts modernity’s teachability
from itself such that even its own experience as other, its self-experience, is not its
own. Bauman’s modernity for itself becomes modernity’s indifference to itself, an
experience that eschews all the phenomenological difficulties of being teachable.
Bauman’s methodologism not only allows him to remove postmodernity from the
conditions of its own possibility, it enables him to abstract the conditions of the
possibility of knowledge in general from having their own content, freeing method
and culture from content and from freedom.
While Freire attempts to make teachability a resolution of contradiction,
Bauman’s skepticism attempts to liberate teachability from its own difficulties,
origins, and conditions of possibility. His free-floatingteachability appears to have
“privatized” desire for a freedom from the all-encompassingtendency for control
that is modernity. Postmodernity has not found “a new antidote for old poison,” and
he admits that the ”anything goes” environment that it engenders is both disturbing
yet pleasurable (IP, xviii). It means, he says, that we must for the foreseeable future
live in “the practical recognition of the relevance and validity of the other’s
difference, expressed in a willing engagement in the dialogue” [IF‘, xxi).In the
postmodern condition we must now live with ”contingency and ambivalence” [IP,
TUEES The Concent of ”Teachabilitv” 85

187).However,when contingencyand ambivalenceare removed and abstracted from

modern reason (under the guise of a lack of method), they remain the victory of
universal indifference and skeptical method over the knowing of contingency and
ambivalence as self, or over the conception of subjectivity that is teachability.
MOURNING
POSTMODERN
When postmodern skepticism accepts its doubt as the ”I,” it becomes the “I” of
the unhappy consciousness: an “unhappy, inwardly disrupted consciousness” that
is aware of its own self-contradictorynature (PS, 126).This formulation is an advance
on mere skepticism, forthe unhappy consciousnessdoes have content as well as form
now, but it is unable to know that content as its own. It is not teachable in this crucial
respect. It is a bridge between God and man, but one whose self-generated illusions
mean that it has the bridge as the other andnot as itself, as its own thinking. As such,
Hegel says the unhappy consciousness “can only find as a present reality the grave
of its life” (PS, 132). The unhappiness of this consciousness is its natural law
appearance. Having truth for contingency as lost, “already flown,” and an unattain-
able beyond, the unhappy consciousness can only ”feel” that (lost)universal and,
being true to its feelings, act with integrity in such mourning (PS, 131).This “return
of the feeling heart into itself” (PS, 132)is the positing of the unhappy consciousness
as self, an inner certainty that it is less than the master but much more than merely
the slave. This inner certainty characterizes one of the most recent attempts in
educational theorizing to move beyond the skepticism of postmodern theorizing -
an attempt to treat contingency as authentic, which only succeeds, however, in
traducing the paradox of contingency into the law of the heart.
This unhappy consciousnessappears in the notion of “authentic subjectivity” in
Blake et al., who argue that, after postmodernism, educators and theorists should
“think again.” They want teachers to learn that remedies to problems should be
“local rather than all-encompassing,” and they argue that theorists should not be
offering teachers ”tidy prescriptions” for such remedies (TA, 186).Blake et al. reject
the nihilistic interpretations of postmodern (or, better, poststructuralist)
deconstruction, particularly those that seem to leave us “no objective values and no
autonomous independent subjects or agents” (they mention Foucault’s work as an
example; TA, 69).Yet they seek to embrace the lessons regarding contingency that
postmodernism teaches, such as the concept that subjectivity cannot be “separated
from the question of knowledge and power” (again, they cite Foucault’s work in
describing these lessons; TA, 69). In seeking to square the contingent circle of
authentic yet relative subjects, they assert that
a reading of poststructuralismneed only imply that the self is not autonomous,not wholly self-
creating or single-mindedand coherent....Even if there is no single description of the human
condition, taking the law of dfference as our guiding principle and treating contingency as an
absolute does not leave us impotent or speechless (TA,73).
They recognize the “predxament of the (individual)educator who finds herself amid
value pluralism and abandoned by grand metanarratives,” but they argue that such
educators need to become “critically pragmatic” and skilled in the “metaphronesis”
of dealing with this absolute contingency (TA, 74, 70, 71).
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Here, then, is the unhappy consciousness, aware of the universal as beyond or

lost, and of the particular as a real subjectivity. This appearance of the unhappy
consciousness in educational theorizing is important on two counts. First, contra
postmodernity and poststructuralism, it signals the return of the subjectivity of the
teacher; second, it dares to talk of contingency as “absolute.” This theory is most
definitely a “thinking again” about the notion of subjective substance in education,
an idea rooted in Plato but cauterized in both right-wing and left-wing neo-
Hegelianism. However, Blake et al.’s readings of Kant, Hegel, and Ssren Kierkegaard
close off three major intellectual resources for their insights, revealing how their
notion of absolute contingency is still denied its own formative significance as
teachability. The authors describe subjectivity in Hegel as “achieved through
mutual recognition in the symmetry of reflection between self and others” (TA,121).
Yet there is no mutual recognition for self-consciousness anywhere in Hegel’s
philosophy. The Phenomenology ends in Golgotha and the Science of Logic ends
with an abstract discussion of method. Where Hegel does talk about mutual
recognition in the Phenomenology (inparagraph 1841, he makes it very clear that this
“middle term” is available to self-consciousness only as extremes that are opposed
to one another, or as misrecognition. We might say that there is mutual recognition
between the object and the slave as a thing, but it is precisely the misrecognition of
this as the “I” that is always the social and political manifestation of the absence of
mutual recognition. The ‘“1’ that is ‘We”’ (PS, 110) is spirit, but Blake et al.’s
misreading of spirit as mutual recognition rather than misrecognition predetermines
that their notions of subjectivity and the absolute are fated to stumble up (another1
“blind alley” (TA, 74).
The authors reject the notion of “autonomous subjectivity” in favor of “authen-
tic subjectivity” (TA,79).Where contingency is absolute, they say, the illusion of the
possibility or desirability of autonomy is destroyed. What is left is that we should be
true to this contingency. This authenticity, say the authors, has two dimensions:
antagonistic, where we protest against socially constituted repressions and con-
straints, and integrative, where we reconcile “all the constitutive moments of the
self under the aegis of a unique life-project” (TA, 79).
It is here in Blake et al. that the unhappy consciousness lives out the grave of its
life as natural law. They cite authentic subjectivity within a context of
intersubjectivity, for “an agent cannot articulate a project concerning who she wants
to be on her own” (TA, 79). As such, authenticity “presupposes a moment of
recognition on the part of another” (TA, 79). What is authenticated is not contin-
gency as the formative life-and-death struggle of consciousness, however, but
contingency as an abstract relation of (bourgeois)equality between others who, in the
sanctity of the ”feeling” self, posit an integrity of care and trust, but are as indifferent
to themselves as to each other. Re-cognition in Blake et al. is traduced into the
natural law concept of “the law of the heart,” where authenticity is posited as the
inner certainty of the unhappy consciousness.
This problem becomes clearer where the natural laws of the heart and the
conscience subsume their reading of the “suspension of the ethical” in Kierkegaard’s
TUBBS The Concept of “Teachability” 87

Fear and Trembling.Quoting Kierkegaard on the risk of learning without knowing

the result to be achieved, Blake et al. find a form of risk and repetition that sees
teaching as the work of the heart that learns as it gives and does not simply give what
it has learned. They call this activity teaching “without reserve, a dissemination
with no clear outcomes or calculable returns” (TA, 148). This suspension is not
Kierkegaardian, however. Abraham does not go to Mount Moriah without reserve,
without outcomes, and without calculable returns. On the contrary, his suspension
is teleological. Abraham is not an unhappy consciousness who, in following his
heart, sees God as ”something beyond” or as “ineffable” (TA, 151).The reverse is
true: he suspends ethical teleology precisely to know the “beyond” and the “inef-
fable” -precisely to know God. “Either there is a paradox, that the singleindividual
as single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute, or Abraham is
l o ~ t . ~If! Abraham
]~ “learns by heart,” as described by Blake et al., then there is no
suspension (TA, 148). If the heart is worded or thesaurized by inner certainty, then
there is no paradoxical task to perform,and Abraham will be a murderer. Without the
teleological suspension, there is no repetition. The suspension consists of calculat-
ing the return. Blake et al.’s relativistic reading of faith as giving without return is
exactly the “scandal of abstract intelligence” that Kierkegaard spent his life trying
to expose.16If Abraham had followed his heart in the way the authors describe, then
“Abraham is lost [for]faith has never existed in the world precisely because it has
always existed.””
Further, the authors ground their conception of intersubjectivity as a heart-to-
heart relation of authentic subjectivities without outcome or calculable return in
Kant’s notion of reflective judgment. Yet, contrary to such a law of the heart, Kant
defines reflective judgment as being “in need of a principle.”l8If the principle of
authenticity is supplied by intersubjectivity or recognition of the heart, then this
becomes a subsumptive or determinate judgment and accounts for its heavy-
handedness over the aporetic self-determination of (contingent)s~bjectivity.’~
As Freire posits the “teacher-student” as a praxis that overcomes its own
relation, and postmodern skepticism abstracts the teacher from the student such
that neither learns from the other, so Blake et al. posit an authentic subjectivity that

15. Seren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetitzon [Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1983}, 120.
16. Swen Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 27
17. Kierkegaard, Fear and TremblinglRepetition, 55.
18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Iudgment (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 19891, 18.
19. Equally intriguing, I would argue, is Blake et al.’s idea that Kant’s notion of reflective judgment can
replace ”autonomy” with ”authenticity.” They argue that the principle of moral autonomy -“the ability
to think for oneself, to be able to think from other people’s perspectives and to think consistently” - is,
in reflective judgment, a form of intersubjective recognition. When reflective judgment is misrecognized
as “intersubjective” (in the same way that re-cognition was in Hegel),however, then reflective judgments
are themselves subsumedunder a different kindof judgment altogether. In each of these cases, the difficulty
of metaphysics, of spirit, and of nature is repressed. Perhaps reflective judgment can provide a model of
teachability, but to argue this requires conjoininga transcendental Hegel with the most speculative reading
possible of Kant’s third critique, so that reflection as judgment is precisely not reflection merely as illusory
being. Such an analysis was recently attempted in Howard Caygill, The Colour of Experience (London:
Routledge, 1998).
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is subsumed by its own misrecognition of intersubjectivity, defining it as the heart

and conscience. This subsumption allows them to speak of the (inter)subjective
qualities - particularity, care, integrity, and trust - that constitute authentic
(inter)subjectivity.They conclude,
if the educator is characterised by her willingness to stand for something and simultaneously
willing to care for someone, then the philosophyof authenticity,thus conceived,shouldhelp the
educator out of the problems that the Enlightenmentproject and some of its critics have pressed
on her ...Iand] rescue her from despair JTA,801.
In fact, it achieves the opposite. Authenticity, wrested from its difficult relation
in subjectivity by (and as) the unhappy consciousness, becomes a domination of
subjectivity in the hands of theorists who, as always, cannot resist becoming the
teachers of teachers. Because the absolute “cannot be understood,” defies “any
satisfaction of a principle,” and defies the “possibility of rational explanation“ (TA,
148),we are told that we “mustact justly without seeking recognition,” we “must
give alms without seeking reward,” and we “mustteach and learn without wanting
‘results”’ (TA, 154).The content of this sollen or “task“ is a despairing yet heartfelt
plea that the paradoxical relation between God and the singular not be teleologically
suspended, not be teachable, not be knowable.20
CONCLUSION
In the process of peer review, a criticism of this paper was its “clustering together
[of]many disparate views as if they could be characterized together.” Inevitably,
speculative critique works differently from abstract, merely analytical critique. It is
interested in the structure of misrecognition that these perspectives share, although,
as shown in this essay, these misrecognitions do take different forms. Speculative
critique lies in our experience of these perspectives as misrecognition, and the
concept of “teachability” recognizes that this experience is precisely what each
perspective misrecognizes. It explores the details of each theoretical claim but
knows the experience of their suppression of teachability to be that which they have
in common. The implication of the reviewers’ comments is that this speculative
experience should not be asserted as “universal.” The stakes here are wonderfully
high. We live at a time when reason is held to have created the world in its own image
as the logos. As we saw above, reason is then blamed for “the ills of civilization” and
for having “ruined modern life.’f21However, this pervasive incredulity toward the
absolute is itself, albeit unwittingly, only another manifestation of bourgeois
subjectivity and social relations, and it is grounded in the illusory being of an
understanding that fails to recognize its conditions of possibility. If the aporia of the
understanding has no relation to the absolute, then it ceases to be significant as a
critique of modem social relations, for (again,unwittingly and through its denial] it
has been reduced to the presuppositions of natural law.
Kierkegaard speaks of the offense that the understanding takes when it appears
that it is contingent upon something else, even when it is claiming to understand its

20. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, 44.

21. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (London:Chatto and Windus, 19951, 118, 117.
Turns The Concmt of “Teachabilitv” 89

own contingency. ”It is,” he says, “just as you say, and the amazing thing is that you
think it is an objection.”22The point is that everything the understanding learns
about contingency,whether that learning takes the form of praxis or deconstruction,
has been learned from being contingent. This universality, this absolute, rather than
assertions about openness, hope, infinitepossibility, difference,and undecidability,
is the truly immanent critique of the understanding. In this absolutely recurring
experience -our experience -of all modem and postmodern perspectives, contin-
gency is universal and universally unstable. Kierkegaard provides an apt response to
those who assert that speculative critique does not do justice to the difference in
detail between different perspectives. The difference is only so much variety of a
single and ubiquitous philosophical and educational truth: “What more worthy
object of wonder is there to be found than the person who, seeking in wish and
endeavor, perishing in despair, suddenly discovered that he has what is sought and
the misfortune is that he is standing there and losing it.”= As with philosophy for
Kierkegaard, so now for educational theory. These theorists resemble the man ”who
is wearing his glasses and nevertheless looking for his glasses -that is, he is looking
for something right in front of his nose, but he does not look in front of his nose and
therefore never finds
Critical pedagogy offers the hope of enlightenment from enforced ideological
ignorance and emancipation from existing relations of unfreedom. Postmodernism
offers a tolerant world, respectful of difference and critical of absolute and founda-
tional worldviews that subjugate the voice and life of the other; it can, perhaps, even
claim that the deconstruction of the logos and universal meaning is justice in itself.
But these views, these hopes, are asserted against a philosophy of history that is not
only the determination of such views in their current form, but which has seen the
appearance of such views in many forms. The philosophy of history’s achievement
is that it knows these forms as itself, or as content and contingency.Philosophically,
culture is this absolute self-development. This involves not just an awareness of
difference; teachability knows that it makes all the difference. Modem critical
pedagogy knows the difference as praxis, postmodern skepticism knows the differ-
ence as contingency, and the postmodem unhappy consciousnessknows the differ-
ence as a heartfelt authentic subjectivity. Each one, however, misses the prior
determination of differencein and as modern bourgeois socialrelations. Praxis unites
theory and practice only within the already posited separation of state and religion,
or of external freedom (modemprivate property)and inner freedom (conscience).In
this case, teachability as subjectivity learns of praxis as a suppression of self-
determination. Skepticismholds apart theory and practice only by an already posited
and illusory freedom that can have any content as its own and, therefore, has none.
In this case, teachability as subjectivity learns that skepticism, in its bourgeois

22. Saren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragmentsllohannes Climaczzs (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1985),52.
23. Seren Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (Princeton:Princeton University Press,
1993),23.
24. Smen Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony {Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1989),272.
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manifestation, is immediate universal property relations and that postmodernism as

consciousness is the victory of natural law over freedom. Finally, the unhappy
consciousness that asserts itself as authentic subjectivity does so by internalizing
indifference as “I” and living out negativity without significance.
Critical pedagogy and postmodem (and post-postmodem] theorizing in educa-
tion repeat and reproduce the aporias of reflective thinking without ever recognizing
that the aporias are already determinative. Politically, this means that critical
pedagogy and postmodem pedagogy are never able to have the bourgeois form of
freedom -universal property relations -as their own content. While this condition
might fulfill their hopes, it denies their actuality and our education. Instead, the
content of freedom is asserted to be elsewhere - a disavowal of its own conditions
of possibility and a hidden yet unwitting refuge in natural law. When culture as such
is freedom from content, then the victory of reflection is complete and completed
each time. This victory of reflection is the continuing domination of subjective
freedom over substance, for in each case we have explored, substance is never this
subject.What looks like a critique of existing social and political relations is only and
always another way of masking their domination. Teachability, however, as we have
been exploring it, means learning as self-determination because this subject is
already its own illusion. To be teachable is to know this content as form and to have
my form as content. Such teachability is not available to reflection that has this
absolutely negative content as other or as illusory being, but it is available to the
subject who knows himself or herself as an illusory being.
The purpose of this discussion, I hope, is clear. It is to offer students of education,
be they teachers or not, a different way of understanlng their experience of educa-
tional theory: a philosophical understanding that has their experience as its own
immanent content. Educationaltheory all too often seeks to seduceits audiencewith
ingenious suggestions about what education ought to be. The purpose of speculative
critique is to reveal what education already is. Freire sought a “new term” - the
teacher-student and the student-teacher -but there is no new term. There is only
the ”growth of the self in knowledge” within the struggles of all the old No
new methods are offered here. Teachability requires only a comprehension of what
teachers already are (through Socratic and Kierkegaardian recollection) in order to
effecttheir own re-educationabout the substantial and spiritual nature of their work.
The benefit of the examination is that one might recognize teachability as already
part of the difficult experiences that we live and work with and, further, that this
recognition is teachability as our own formative educational struggle. What we risk
is learning that we are already teachable and are already carrying out the struggle for
freedom within the spiritual work that we perform. Teachability therefore com-
mends freedom as the education that, in realizing domination, learns not to mask
that domination with new, increasingly ingenious methodological solutions, and
with ever more disingenuous ways of telling us that truth cannot be known. Above
all else, teachability means we are teachable and able-to-teach about the absolute.
~~

25. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, 38