Max Stirner and G. W. F. Hegel on the “Struggle for Recognition” in education 581 390
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51896/easc.v2i2.712Keywords:
Anarchism, authority, educational history, Hegel, slavery, Stirner, philosophy education, political educationAbstract
In this paper, I compare and contrast what Max Stirner has to say about the philosophy and politics of education in two of his works, a not so well-known text entitled The False Principle of Our Education (1842), and the much better known The Ego and its Own, which was published three years later. In both of these works, Stirner engages critically with the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. However, Stirner’s relationship to Hegel is ambivalent. Although in a number of respects his thought is recognizably Hegelian, nevertheless he rejects as much from Hegel as he accepts. This is especially true of Stirner’s views on education. Two aspects of Hegel’s thought are relevant for an understanding of Stirner’s theory of education. The first is what Hegel has to say about mastery-and-slavery and the ‘struggle for recognition’ in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). The second is the theory of education which Hegel sets out in his Philosophy of Mind, or the third volume of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), and which he repeats four years later in his Philosophy of Right (1821). Hegel does not himself connect these two things together. It is later thinkers, including Max Stirner, who have done that. My argument is that although the views expressed in both of Stirner’s works were inspired by a particular reading of Hegel, nevertheless in The False Principle of Our Education the reading in question is very different from and superior to that of The Ego and its Own because it is not nihilistic. The theory of education that is set out in The False Principle of Our Education is a significant intermediary between the philosophy of Hegel and the far more critical approaches to pedagogy, which emerged in the 20th Century, especially in the writings of Paolo Freire and Ivan Illich.
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