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C  9 Contingency as Pedagogy: Burbidge on Hegel and Contingency Jill Gilbert Some work is done through suffering, through impoverishment…. realize, then, that impoverishment is also a teacher, unique in its capacity to renew, and that its yield, when it ends, is a passionate openness which in turn reinvests the world with meaning. —Louise Glück (1994), 133–34 The pilgrimage consciousness has undertaken is a pathway to despair. The continuing frustration of confident expectations brought about by contingencies generates many dark moments, when the path forward seems to have evaporated … this agony of negativity is the very essence of spirit. —John Burbidge (2007), 56 John Burbidge is one of the foremost scholars of Hegel in the English-speaking world. He has helped to bring Hegel into the twenty-first century, and has overturned many preconceived notions about Hegel’s philosophy. My a empt in this paper is to illustrate the originality of Burbidge’s thought by appealing to his most recent book, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency, which gathers articles wri en over the course of his philosophical career. In this book Burbidge offers two primary theses. The first of these emphasizes that contingency is necessary in Hegel’s philosophy, and, more specifically, that it is critical to systematic thought. Burbidge’s second thesis, which is derived from the first one, suggests that Hegel’s system is one of historicity and that historicity is incompatible with classical metaphysics. To be more specific, what Burbidge means when he claims that historicity is incompatible with classical metaphysics, is that while history is a fluid movement of human passions and life, the object of classical metaphysics is rather static, devoid of passion, and indeed is represented traditionally by reason. Due to its dynamical and developmental nature, history will push aside static universals or truths and be itself ‘the real’ or ‘the true.’ Burbidge’s work reflects the need for a new metaphysics, one that will integrate history and reason, and thus will show that reason, when properly understood, requires and uses the irrationality of contingent passions and the events they create. Burbidge’s two primary theses—that contingency is critical to a system, and that historicity is incompatible with classical metaphysics—are related to what I take to be a third theme of Burbidge’s work, and also a vital aspect of Hegel’s work. 122 P    A Hegel’s system, which puts forward history as “the real,” is a system that comes to know itself as a system. We might ask: How could a system such as history come to know itself as a system? This question cannot be answered without looking at Hegel’s notion of spirit, which I shall explore in some detail. For now, suffice it to say that spirit is human life in community. History, which is a human process, is a spilling out of spirit in time. That is, history can be seen as the temporal movement of human community. When we ask how it is that spirit can come to know itself as a historical body, we will find that it can only ever come to know itself through individuals like us. In this paper I shall attempt to explain these theses and themes found in Burbidge’s book. The approach I shall take will be to look at the familiar ways in which we experience contingency and then to trace the development of such experiences . Burbidge argues that the contingencies that spirit runs up against set it on a pathway to despair, which creates an opportunity for “a new, richer life.”3 Applying Burbidge’s argument to the realm of the individual, I shall put forward my argument that one way in which spirit comes to know itself as the embodiment of reason is through the individual’s experience of her own life as contingent. My argument is in three parts. First, I shall argue that contingency serves as a call to learning. In other words, we can interpret contingent events as meaningful events that demand change. Second, I shall suggest that our “final” experience of contingency is the recognition that we are ourselves contingent. We could have been otherwise, or we might not have been at all. This experience is one where not only do we realize that we may never have been born, but we also sense that our particular interests, projects, and passions are contingent, as is our identity itself, based as it is on...

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