| Few will disagree that philosophy is educational, or that at the root of philosophy lies
the struggle to understand ourselves, or, even, that this struggle is formative for us.
The real disagreement begins regarding the nature and import of this learning. In the
following pages I will challenge philosophical experience to recognise the notion of
the absolute that lies hidden within the struggles and contradictions of its educational
substance and activity. And if the absolute is another way of saying God, then I will be
arguing that God is currently masked within the illusions of social relations, but can be
known in and as philosophy’s higher education.
The term ‘philosophy’s higher education’ carries two immanent connotations. It is
both the higher education that philosophy can offer to other disciplines about
themselves, and it is the higher education of philosophy by itself. As Kant recognised
in The Conflict of the Faculties, higher education in general needs philosophy in order
to know why and how it is ‘higher’. But in order to achieve this, philosophy itself, the
so-called lower faculty, must find within itself the truth of the education that it then
offers to other disciplines. Kant’s three Critiques in this sense act as the work required
for the former, and as the pre-requisite for the work of the latter. |
