The Gillian Rose project

How to understand Gillian Rose’s project? Shapes of its afterlives are numerous: religious, literary, artistic, philosophical, political, cultural, sociological. Nevertheless, the project as a whole remains elusive. Perhaps the project died before its time? Or perhaps the project closed its own time? Perhaps Gillian was the last Hegelian? After all, who now reads Hegel? Alternatively, perhaps the totality of the project is being domesticated by its popularity among ephemeral readers who unintentionally and unironically assimilate it into that which it opposes? Who, then, can do justice to the Rose project? Not the modernist or the non-modernist; not the religious or the non-religious; not the philosopher or the non-philosopher; not the dialectical or the non-dialectical. Fateful for all of them, the project, instead, does justice to them by carrying their relationship to each other until they are, for themselves, something understood.

I first met Gillian Rose in 1986 when I joined the MA in Sociological Studies at Sussex University, which she ran with William Outhwaite.¹ She was running a module on ‘The Sociology of Knowledge’, which was based closely on chapter 1 of Hegel Contra Sociology (1981).²

She was doing sociology because she believed that it had inherited the neo-Kantian oppositions between law and ethics. Where Kant had worked with transcendental preconditions of possibility, sociology was working with social preconditions of possibility. And the sociology of knowledge was the meta-critical frontline: it explored how our knowing of preconditions is affected or compromised by those preconditions. What kind of truth, if any, is possible here?

Gillian Rose’s whole project can, I think, be seen as one of struggling with this question of integrity within the pre-existing necessity of presupposition. She finds the modern self-consciousness of positing to be sociology, and she finds the exploration of illusion and complicity to be critical theory, especially in Adorno. For Hegel the Science of Logic is the tribunal in which positing holds itself to account, and is not afraid to publish that account, that doctrine, as its own logic. For Gillian, sociology and critical theory try to stage their own similar tribunal.

How significant is it, then, forty years later, that sociology of exactly this kind is under attack, especially in the USA, as being the basis for everything ‘woke’. Since the 1960s its philosophy of contingency became part of the rhetoric of relativism in human affairs, meaning that no fixed identities of race, gender, nationality, biology, human or animal are possible, or, alongside this, that individuals cannot be blamed for their actions, their crimes or their immigration. The backlash against this relativism simmered, until it exploded into populist movements that decried the whole progressive and liberal sociological vision of the world. The central focus of Gillian’s work, contingency and how to live with it, has become more, not less, politically volatile since her death.

But the world has changed dramatically since 1997. The extent to which Gillian’s project can speak to the generations that come after her is questionable, partly because her work is grounded in universal – albeit aporetic universal – ideas at a time when universality is unfashionable. It can no longer simply be taken for granted that ideas are put forward in the public sphere, debated and fought over. Faith or trust in that very sphere and its intellectual activities has collapsed. The Gillian Rose project existed in those final moments when it was still the case that ideas could hold universal truths. Now, whatever the content or politics of such ideas, the real battle is in retrieving the credibility of ideas per se. Ideas have been flattened by the appeal of the more immediate, the visceral, the appeal to quick stimulation and quick thrill, and a growing addiction to them via social media. So-called postmodern philosophy helped to create the conditions for this. It undermined and then rejected the ‘Idea’, characterizing it as some kind of disembodied tyrannical essence that ruled, untouched, from above bodies and emotions. In the wake of this rejection lay the remains of the idea (the essence) of human being, of humanity, of a life shared or a life in common.

The Gillian Rose project explains both the experience and the science of this cancelling of the Idea, not by simply holding on to or alternatively rejecting some abstract notion of essence, but by yielding to the necessity of the equivocation of essence.

I would put it like this. Hegel’s philosophy is an exercise in the integrity of presupposition. Kant got close. But Hegel pursued it relentlessly to the end, an end he called absolute, but by which he did not mean that the necessity of positing had been overcome, only that it had been understood. (We will return to the absolute later.) And by ‘understood’ he did not mean ‘completed’ and freed from presupposition. What was understood, including about understanding, was that positing carried thought and its object in the relationship of an owner and his property. The latter, the object, was posited as for the former, thought. This ‘propertied’ shape of knowing was what was already posited in positing.

Key here for Gillian was illusory being. (She once said to me, as an MA student, that the section on illusory being in the Science of Logic was the key to everything else in Hegel.) Thinking dogmatically, reflection could allow itself to think that it had indeed understood positing as its own self-reflective essence (‘I think therefore I am’). Thinking sceptically, it could say that even this essence was just another illusion. This could then be logically extended to the eschewal of the idea of essence per se (sic), and, as well, of the essence of the Idea. But both dogma and scepticism are one-sided dominations of positing. They are both ways of avoiding integrity in the face of positing. Such illusory being, whether asserting or denying its reflective essence, is still within the propertied logic of owner and property. Reflection still grants itself the mastery of deciding whether the already posited object is or is not of and for the master. In doing so, illusory being allows itself to believe that it has avoided having to risk thinking more deeply about the fateful vicious circle or infinite regression that terrifies its practitioners and haunts all mastery.

Hegel Contra Sociology in particular shows the effects of illusion in neo-Kantian philosophy and sociology, but it also argues that the logic of illusion is still prevalent and will dominate future thinking in new ways. Gillian’s publications after 1981 try to expose some of these. The Gillian Rose project from 1981 in effect says, I told you so. I told you what happens when private property shapes all positing, including of itself. And I told you that this could be known even though, to the abstract consciousness, it looked impossible to know. The truth of abstraction can be known, absolutely. But, we can ask in 2025, where is this work to be done now, where is this Rose project to be pursued? Gillian once said, in a talk at at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, that universities were crucial in sustaining the culture of critiquing the domination of the abstract. But the pervasiveness of illusion and the attack on the Idea has now gone deep into the universities. Who knows what kind of Rectoral speeches lie ahead?

I studied one term with William Outhwaite and I was due to study with Gillian after Christmas, but she was on sabbatical in early 1987. So I said to her that I could perhaps study on a module with the Education department – I was a practising secondary-school teacher, studying part time. No, she said, we can’t let those barbarians loose on you. You will study with me at my home. And so I spent a challenging term trying to understand the master/slave relation from the Phenomenology of Spirit with her in her study in Chester Terrace, Brighton. I’m still trying to understand it.

Just before that, in December of 1986, in her university office, I asked her, why Hegel? Why is Hegel right and all the others wrong? She replied in two words: subjective substance.

It is worth just noting here that this came from a conversation we were having about ‘middles’, or, as we were calling them, ‘magic thirds’. Gillian and I used to laugh about magic thirds, which claimed to be resolutions and reconciliations of sociological dualisms. Our favourite, and the one that produced giggles, was Anthony Giddens’s structuration, by which of course he meant making a middle out of the interminable opposition between structure and action.

Subjective substance and the absolute often bring a sense of unease when discussing Gillian’s work, although perhaps less so in more recent publications. One of my experiences of her was how much she enjoyed generating this kind of discomfort. I attended the inaugural conference of the Nietzsche Society of Great Britain in Essex in the early 1990s, and Gillian, a guest speaker, opened with, ‘Well, Nietzsche certainly wouldn’t want this.’

So, in that spirit, I thought I’d open this conference with the discomfort of subjective substance and the absolute. But I am going to do so in an unusual way; not by academic description or defence, but by way of illustration through student experience. Or, more technically, as a series of relations and misapprehensions of student natural consciousness, or, again, by presenting their work and her work as a phenomenology. One of the afterlives of Gillian’s work that I have been responsible for has been designing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees based on her thinking – or, as I have already referred to it, based on her project. I’m referring to it as the Rose project, but referring to her as Gillian, noting but not completely acceding to Peter Osborne’s desire for the person and the work to be dispossessed of each other. Symbolic I think of the disagreements Peter has with Gillian, I’m offering the relation of Gillian and the project as that of subject and substance, while nominating the science of the project ‘Rose’.

So, I’m going to speak of student experience. And I hope Gillian would approve. She told me once that at her interview for the job at Warwick University she was asked, ‘What practical application does your work have in the real world?’ She replied by saying that one of her PhD students (me) was a schoolteacher and planned to use the work to change the shape of education. I take some relief, thirty years later, that Gillian’s work is sympathetic to failure… but I did try.

I will get to the student experience in a minute. Let me just say something else about how I see her project. I think it is a coherent project, from start to finish. And I’m sure we’ll discuss at some point in this conference its seeming to move from politics to religion.

I see it like this. The Rose project, from her 1976 article on how critical theory is possible, to the final notebooks in hospital, is a vigorous, relentless struggle to understand contingency and to live that understanding with integrity. Its Nietzscheanism is that it says Yes to contingency, and Yes to the contingency of that Yes. Its critical Hegelianism is that it says No to the abstract, and No to the abstraction of that No.³ And by contingency I simply mean the conditions of our possibility.

Of course, this is not a new project. It has underpinned parts of the European philosophical tradition. Plato said we think not under conditions we choose but contingent upon the Forms. Kant said we understand not under conditions we choose but contingent upon the synthetic a priori. Marx said we make not under conditions we choose but contingent upon modern relations of production. Adorno said we criticize not under conditions we choose but contingent upon reification, perhaps total reification.

And their projects reached various conclusions. Plato thought we could live justly with this contingency. Kant thought we might know its freedom but not its truth. Marx thought this contingency had the seeds of its own self-overcoming. And Adorno feared that the critical consciousness required for that overcoming might in fact be impossible.

Enter the Rose project. In her PhD and the writing of 1976–79 she distils earlier experiences of contingency into a question, or a tribunal. Is critical consciousness still possible if no objective distance exists between objects and a critical awareness of their illusory appearance? If reification is total, is critical theory coherent?

Facing these melancholic questions, Gillian takes from Adorno the idea that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder. In other words, if totality was watertight there wouldn’t be a tribunal at all. Yes, contingency predetermines us; and yes, therefore we can never know it or criticize it objectively, or at a complete distance. But we do know it. As such, on page 48 of her Adorno book, she says she does not see reification as total. Rather, following Adorno, she sees the concept of totality as reified. The project embarks on the struggle to understand how totality here is unknowable but still, somehow, we do know it. Or, technically, the but we do know it is the in-itself, lost to being for-another, and then this not-knowing is lost again to being for-itself.

And the questions, ‘what kind of knowledge? and what kind of truth, if any, is this, but we do know?’ is I think where the action forms around Gillian. And it seems to be all things to all people. Some of her religious readers find God here. Some of her political readers find an aberrated Marxism, while some more recently have found again the idea of a renewed critical Marxism. Zygmunt Bauman found postmodernism here. Literary readers have enjoyed it as the theatre of style. For some it is where we find the equivocation of the middle. Many, including Jay Bernstein, have understood it as ‘excess’.

For Gillian, in the very early writing, the but we do know implied a utopian possibility of the rational identity of concept and object. The fate of this identity is, I would suggest, one of the things that brings us all here today to think about her work.

Student experience

How did the project develop after 1979? As I have said, I will illustrate this through student experience on the university degrees on which I have taught. It means some shortcuts, and, as they say, whilst it is based on actual events, any coincidence with the experience of any one student alive or dead is purely coincidental.

Students arrive. From the experience that they have of the texts that we bring to them, from Socrates and Plato onwards, questions emerge about society and justice. Inevitably this leads to us asking together, what is critical thinking? Are you critical thinkers? Is critical thinking possible? Yes, they say, immediately; we hope so, they say, after some reflection; perhaps not, they say, after their own attempts to change the world are frustrated. No, they say, when all such attempts appear to be self-defeating and, as they often express their experience of totality, the system just keeps winning. It’s all sown up. Their experiences encapsulate the Rose project from 1976 to 1979.

Then, when they look at how critical reason tries to respond to its own complicity within this totality, or the system, students find the dialectic of enlightenment. Enlightenment, whether by name or not, was already their key tool in changing the world. You see through illusions, the scales fall from your eyes, and then you go out and enlighten others, and the world changes. Except that, in a sown-up totality, even enlightenment does not change things but only reproduces its own conditions of possibility. Hopeful and perhaps radical student thinking falls into an abyss of infinite regression.

I expect many of us have had something of this experience at some time. The current manifestation of this infinite regression to nothingness is the widely reported ‘student disengagement’. Their critical consciousness, now redundant in the world, resigns itself and says just tell me what I need for my essay.

To this, Gillian’s 1970s work offers style, a form of subjectivity that can live with contingency without the need for fantasies of immunity from or standpoints beyond contingency. Style (unlike the idea of total reification) has this relation to its illusion or appearance. It looks like an integrity in living with the ‘but we do know our conditions of possibility’. So, do students find style here in their moments of difficulty with enlightenment? They do, but not exactly the kind that the Gillian Rose project commends.

On offer to students is the style of a new postmodern ethics. The postmodern – used in the widest and most sweeping sense that Gillian uses it in her inaugural lecture at Warwick (1993) and elsewhere – says to them: ‘All your problems, all the self-contradictions of critique, all the dead ends, can be blamed on reason. Reason, from the ancients onwards, was on an imperialist anthropocentric campaign to assert and defend its position in the Great Chain of Being.⁴ Anything above it or superior was unknowable. Anything below it was knowable as inferior, including women, other races and cultures, plants and nature. It has been responsible for misogyny, racism, oppression, colonialism, slavery. You can leave this whole tradition behind, cancel it. Instead of the hierarchy of differences, we can offer a new ethic of difference, a new relation to the other. We can even offer something called authenticity.’

I think it is noticeable that at this point students and many of their lecturers board the train of difference still carrying a rational ticket. The new pluriverse is often a loose version of a kind of mutual recognition taken beyond the anthropocentric and simply made inclusive of everything. Students and lecturers ride this postmodern train with a rational ticket, but really the ticket for this train is issued and validated by another train company altogether. And here is the second moment of the Gillian Rose project. This validating company is what Gillian explores in Dialectic of Nihilism. In her terms, the nothingness of reason that the students experienced styles itself now as self-perficient or self-completing nihilism. This self-perficient nihilism, she says, is active in asserting the death of metaphysics; but it is passive regarding its own preconditions when it leaps from representation to immediate affirmations of promise or presence, and it is passive, therefore, in regard to its own implication or contingency within law and ethics, within the tradition. Gillian finds a lack of integrity with contingency here at what she calls the bottom rungs of the phenomenological ladder.⁵ Any notion of authenticity here is just a shape of illusory being, positing an essence that is immune from itself.

But in the Gillian Rose project, and for the students, self-perficient nihilism is experienced as a dialectic of nihilism. Students often have a very simple and direct way of expressing this. ‘All these people who say that they are postmodern are just like the moderns. They are still claiming they are right, or enlightened about things, and still telling everyone else how to understand the world properly.’ Modern myth becomes postmodern enlightenment, and postmodern enlightenment returns to modern myth. Here is the dialectic of nihilism. The trouble is that we have been here before. It’s just another vicious dialectical circle leading nowhere.

And so, again, it all collapses, and the students fall back on just tell me what I need for my essay…

This despairing rationalism is rich soil for the Gillian Rose project. Keep your mind in hell she says, and despair not. So what contribution can the project make here at this moment for the students?

In the Hegel book we learn (from the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit) that scepticism or doubt is self-perficient when, despairing at itself, it doubts its own presuppositions. This is its conscious insight into its untruth. This is Hegel’s game-changing observation. We think that truth is unthinkable. But this judgement has its condition of possibility in the positing that truth or substance is on one side and thinking of truth or subjectivity is on the other. This fear of falling into error – thinking the truth – is in fact a finite error that presupposes the finite is not already part of how truth is conceived. And if, in addition, you know the finite and therefore the infinite to have a social and political shape, then (and it’s often taken to be one of the Rose project’s most difficult challenges) the idea we have of truth is already the idea we have of our social and political selves; it is subjective substance.

If you presume you can’t think the absolute, then you excuse yourself from having already presupposed the absolute according to its social and political contingency. This exclusion, whether meaning to or not, becomes a politics, which presumes that truth (and I think you could also add here logic) lies outside of politics.⁶ Whether judging the truth of a universal class, or of a non-universal otherness, or of a religion, or of styles of art, the part played by the finite in already presupposing what the truth is, and isn’t, has to be included. Otherwise, our contingency within social and political relations is excluded.

Just a thought here. Self-perficient doubt, doubt doubting itself, enters the pathway of despair. But, as Gillian says, this path is not just negative. It is not a closed path. Why not? Because it does not despair at its despair. It’s not total. Even despair does not go into its concept without leaving a remainder. We do know this despair. As such, I wonder, to be really consistent here, if this is less ‘Keep your mind in hell and despair not’ but rather ‘Keep your mind in despair because despair is not, after all, hell.’

So, what is doubt now in the project? The answer to this question moves us from style to the science of style, or from Adorno to Hegel. Thinking doubting itself is not closed totality or infinite regression. It is triadic. One way of putting it is that immediacy is lost to mediation; mediation is returned to immediacy; and the experience of their relation is the third partner. What was only implied in Adorno and carried by style now, in the Hegel book, finds its own science. In the Hegel book Gillian points out that spirit, recognition and actuality in Hegel all have this triadic structure.

You might think that this is not the kind of thing that will excite disengaged students. That is not my experience of the Gillian Rose project. For the students it provokes re-engagement. It offers phenomenology. They can now explore, or re-cognize as Gillian might say, previous content differently through the triadic phenomenological experience of that content. Additionally, now as subjective substance, or in relation to truth, they can explore these experiences – the ones that previously left them cold and dispirited and disengaged and disenchanted and resigned – as formative, even as self-determinative. Their experiences can speak for themselves. And why is this not just a chat about how they feel? Because the project also offers the science of these experiences. Subjective substance and the absolute are now the science of style or of but we do know.

Briefly, what does this re-engagement look like? Students want to learn about the project because in reading about it they are reading about themselves. They get help initially from Love’s Work, which tells of the difficulty of understanding and living as subjective substance through noses, cancer, love relationships, doctor/patient relationships, families and death. Its final chapter helps to unpack the intellectual journey a little and to see how it – the but we do know – can be understood within the tradition very differently. They like the term ‘broken middle’, particularly as a way of capturing the ambiguities of negating and yet also preserving identity. And they like the idea that reason is a friend that you don’t have to dump just because that friendship demands constant renegotiation.⁷

There are many other avenues for them, but I’m going to break off here to end on four observations on what the students might make of the politics of the project.

First, and perhaps above all, the project gives difficulty – personal and professional – renewed social and political meaning. Working in threes, with the third partner, gives a different kind of meaning to the critique of mastery and its intrigues than does an eternally returning dialectic of enlightenment.⁸

Second, the self-determination we’ve been talking about is not some kind of existential self-help. Gillian is damning of such an idea in Love’s Work. This re-engagement with contingency is re-engagement with the social. Gillian called it a political theology. I prefer paideia taken, somewhat loosely, to refer to the life – the living – of politeia in its two senses: these are city matters and the city matters.

Third, and I think of real importance for the present moment, this triadic thinking is also a re-engagement with the universal. Using the UK National Health Service as an example, thinking about the universal involves not just the universal entitlement to free medical care for each particular. That is just an abstract or formal entitlement. Thinking universally means triage; the practice of the triadic, that is, judging how to treat everyone the same, or equally, by treating them differently, according to their singular contingencies.

Fourth, contingency grounds the fluidity in which abstract masteries have been undermined and new rights for the un­recognized have been fought for and won. But, as noted earlier, the universality of contingency is under attack in the present culture wars as the fake truth of everything woke. Not the least of which is that university courses that teach for contingency, and perhaps even about contingency, are being closed.

It is questionable whether the modern European philosophical tradition, and with it progressive politics, has any clear response to this. There is yet to emerge a way or indeed ways of re-engaging people with the universal. This attack on contingency also comes from a real sense of injustice. It carries the feeling that contingency benefits others, but not me – ‘they’ always get doctors’ appointments and social housing and jobs because their cultural backgrounds have to be compensated for. Such a view expresses how people currently experience contingency not as their attachment to the universal but as their exclusion from it.

In the language of the Gillian Rose project this viewpoint says to the liberal elite: We know that your concepts don’t go into your objects, because we are your objects and your concepts don’t go into us.

If people feel excluded from the universal, then no wonder they seek alternative truths that they can find themselves included within. And a different style of contingency, a different style of but we do know, a privatized version, is on offer, one that turns ressentiment at contingency into immediate, selectively inclusive masteries. Some of these are very familiar: for example, but we do know that men and women are fixed biological identities; and but we do know that races are not the same. And populism takes this but we do know to the bottom of the phenomenological ladder, where the identity of concept and object is accepted as common sense. Here immediate dishonesty is seen by disillusioned people as more honest than the ‘fake’ truths of contingency, especially the contingencies of the views and ideas of experts and academics.

So, how might the project intervene? If, as Gillian says, illusions are not false, and if, as she also says, films could be made that allow for dialectical experiences of fascism, rather than safe voyeuristic ones, then the project might consider how to relate differently to regressive sentiments than simply as ‘them and us’.⁹ It might explore how to retrieve the universality of contingency from its currently privatized version.

I end with this thought, couched in terms of recent UK educational history, and recollective of a conversation with Gillian in her kitchen in 1987. Plato’s Republic and the Gillian Rose project are about the soul and the city; they are paideia.¹⁰ Both have ‘an educative, a political intent’.¹¹ But where Plato, in the Republic, differentiated his universal thinking, his tripartite paideia, into differently educated social classes, the Rose project offers tripartite paideia comprehensively, without naturalized appearances of abilities. Alas, in the conversation in her kitchen, I don’t think I ever did manage to convince her of that.

Footnotes

1. 1. This article retains the conversational style in which it was written for the opening of the conference ‘Rosean Futures’. ↩

2. 2. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, Athlone, London, 1981. ↩

3. 3. I thank Robert Lucas Scott for this reminder of the ‘No’. ↩

4. 4. See https://socratesontrial.org/the-great-chain-of-being. ↩

5. 5. Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism, Blackwell, Oxford, 1984, p. 210. ↩

6. 6. I have Socrates discuss two logics, the logic of mastery and the logic of education, during his retrial in my Socrates On Trial, Bloomsbury, London, 2021. See also Nigel Tubbs, ‘Gillian Rose and Education’, Telos 173, Winter 2015, pp. 125–43; and Nigel Tubbs, God, Education and Modern Metaphysics: The Logic of ‘Know Thyself’, Routledge, New York, 2015. ↩

7. 7. An idea found in the Introduction to Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993. ↩

8. 8. Examples include: the climate activist who takes contingency as a critique of her own mastery in running community projects; the trans students, who, through their transitioning at university, found the fluidity of subjective substance as a self-determination that could hold the ambiguities of identity within itself; the teacher who finds truth in the experience of learning rather than in the national curriculum; and the co-ordinator of care services who wants to re-engage jaded care professionals with thinking education rather than training. ↩

9. 9. See chapter 2 of Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. ↩

10. 10. This came together at the conference ‘The Soul and the City’ that was happening in the Department of Sociology at Warwick on the day she died, 9 December 1995. ↩

11. 11. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 217. ↩