The si- multaneity of two events locally close is not verifiable because every verification processes
presupposes
it.
Hegel Was Right_nodrm
But we need to clarify, once and for all, the concept of time: the central thesis of this chapter still has to be confirmed and studied in more depth.
It is obvious that our objectors --as innocent as only they can be-- suppose that time is continuous. Newton would also like to capture such
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 108 Hegel was right
continuity when he says that time 'flows' and that it is 'mathematical'. Now, in the sense that Newton and our objectors conceive it, conti- nuity is not a data of our psychological or empirical experience. It could not be the former case, because no one can be incessantly having acts of self-consciousness, but it could not be the latter either, because even if we gratuitously suppose that physical time is continuous, our per- ception of time is not uninterrupted: no one can be carrying out acts of perception incessantly.
In our century something both curious and incongruent has hap- pened: even though physics have rejected absolute time for not being an empirical data, they still believe in a relative time that possesses the same dubious continuity which is not and cannot be an empirical data. And they do exactly the same thing in regard of absolute and relative space.
The highly dubious continuity we have alluded to is the mathemati- cal one. Following Bergson, Capek has very well remarked that the mathematical is a "disguised discontinuity" (1973, 321), for it supposes the existence of several different units --called 'points' in the case of space and time--; one wants them to yield the impression of continu- ity because one thinks of them as standing in a juxtaposition, but in fact they are external from one another. That is called contiguity, not continuity.
As Poincare? noticed, one demands a strong nexus between the ele- ments of the continuum for that is what really makes it a whole; in the real continuity, the point has no priority over the line, but rather the line has priority over the point. According to its true concept, the continuum is unity in multiplicity; but in mathematical continuity "only the multi- plicity subsists; the unity has disappeared. " (1909, 30)
Hegel had observed this long time ago: "To the imagination that lacks the concept, continuity easily transforms into juxtaposition, which is an extrinsic relation of the units between themselves, in which each unity preserves its absolute discontinuity and exclusion" (WL I 181).
The inescapable conclusion --a conclusion which requires an intel- lectual honesty of which physics commonly lack-- is that the time and the space of the physics are contradictory entities:
It is not contradictory in imagination that one puts points in space, mo- ments in the continuous time or the now of time within continuity length (day, year), but its concept is contradictory. The identity within itself means
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 109
absolute continuation, extinction of all distinction, of the negative, of all the being-on its-own; on the other hand, the point is the pure being-on-its-own, the absolute distinguishing itself and suppression of all identity and coher- ence with others. Now, both things are affirmed as one in space and time; therefore, space and time are contradictions (GP I 307).
"The space is within itself the contradiction of the indifferent exte- riority and the continuity without distinction" (EPW 260).
Notice well that this is not only about absolute time and space. We are not rejecting certain entities on the grounds that they cannot be made objects of our experience. This is much more about all sorts of space and time in Physics. What Hegel demonstrated was that space and time in Physics are contradictory in their very same concept. In the name of this strictly contradictory time, the objection was raised against the spirit as act of self-consciousness and self-determination.
Since mathematical continuity is not true continuity, it is now im- portant to emphasize that the time of the physics is not time.
Jerome Rothstein is very brave to admit that the empirical data do not suffice to build up time. He explicitly states the following: "It is hard to give any sense at all to the term 'past' without presupposing memory or a record of some kind" (Bastin, 1971, 293). Resorting to memory is to witness the reflection of the subject upon himself, that is to say, to wit- ness self-consciousness; so we are in the true time, identified with our self. In contrast, the alluded time of the physical world is simply not time. I don't know why it has taken so long for an exceptional physic like Rothstein to realize that, since Hegel had already demonstrated this with absolute clarity. In regard to the three dimensions of time, Hegel explicitly made this remark. "In addition, one cannot distinguish in nature [. . . ] such distinctions; they are only necessary in the concep- tion of the subject, in memory, fear or hope" (EPW 259 A). This is why Hegel said that, sooner or later, the meaning of all concepts consist in "vital and spiritual situations" (WL I 335).
The absolute lack of time that characterizes the time of physics, instead of diminishing, has been accentuated with the theory of rela- tivity: the expression 'space-time' denotes this, for the four-dimension- al space of Minkowski is simply space (not time), but physics have the whim of calling it so. It happens just what we saw (II 5) with decretory definitions: what they do is to stick to something different and leave time aside.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 110 Hegel was right
Eddington expresses this naively: "In the four-dimensional world we shall accordingly regard 1 second as the equivalent of 300,000 ki- lometres, and measure lengths and times in seconds and kilometres indiscriminately" (1978, 46).
Their procedure is very simple: since a six inches bomb irrigates one hectare of wheat, they take 'wheat' as a synonym of 'water' in- discriminately .
A more lucid physic, Herbert Dingle, has expressed this clearly:
It is therefore because of our voluntary choice of measuring processes that we can speak of the 'union' of space and time into 'space-time'. This has nothing to do with any philosophical notions of space and time in themselves; it is a consequence of the wisdom of making sure that, after expressing motion in terms of space and time, the measurement of time shall depend on the measurement of space. Only on this account is it possible, as Minkowski did, to represent the time-co-ordinate as a fourth space-co-ordinate and describe motion geometrically as a track in a four- dimensional continuum. (Schilpp, ed. , II 1970, 543s).
Although they intend to preserve relative time and evade absolute time, the physics of our century fail in fact to recognize time itself --something that also happened in classical physics with the pos- tulation of an absolute time. This, of course, should not surprise us because time is not something physical.
Mathematical time is not time because --as Hegel demonstrated-- it lacks true continuity. We will later study real continuity as real time. Following a very different path, physics introduced an 'infinite divisibil- ity', which seemed to be a proper feature of space, but the quantum of Planck has demonstrated that it does not even exist in space.
According to the experimental discoveries of quantum physics, it is false that the material reality is infinitely divisible. If we start frac- tioning the material, we will find sooner or later something that is not further divisible. But it surprises me that physics had to wait for Planck, since Hegel demonstrated this in the text we quoted before (GP I 307): it is contradictory not only that time consists of temporal points, but also that space consists of spatial points. In addition, it is evident that something extended cannot be the result of unextended elements.
By means of a dilemma whose second branch derives into a new di- lemma, it is easy to explain that, whoever affirms the infinite divisibility
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 111
of space and rejects the quanta, forcefully affirms that the ulterior com- ponents of space are unextended points. The dilemma is the following one: the ulterior components are either divisible or indivisible. And if they are indivisible, they must necessarily be either extended (quanta) or unextended (points).
We cannot choose the first branch of the dilemma, for if they are divisible they cannot be the ulterior components; they can only be the resulting segments of the last division.
But if we say they are divisible, we would necessarily have to choose between extended or unextended ulterior components. Therefore, whoever rejects the quanta affirms that the ulterior components are points.
It is evident, however, that the sum of unextended elements cannot render something extended. Even before Planck's experiments, the only thing logically sustainable was that the ulterior components of space were quanta i. e. indivisible extended elements. Mathematical space --meaning a space that is infinitely divisible-- is a contradiction of which Hegel timely warned us. Now, on the grounds of the spurious identification of space and time, physics always presented the image of an infinitely divisible time in substitution of a continuous time which is, as we will later see, the only true one. Physics incurred and keeps incurring in two big mistakes: first, to confuse time with space; second, to attribute an infinite divisibility to time that even space lacks.
It is of primal importance to notice that the confusion of space and time is a widespread epidemic: the layman does not have the concept of time. This does not wash away the blame of physics, since the pur- pose of science is not to reaffirm indefinitely the false beliefs of common people. Some figure that time is a fluid, as we saw Newton did; but a fluid is something spatial; evidently, they are imagining themselves being right at the side of a river, which is something spatial: but none of that can be comprised in the concept of time. Others --and this occurs more often-- imagine a line that goes all across the imaginary visual field from one end to the other; they call the left segment 'past' and the right segment 'future'; they call 'present' a very little segment (or point, as they commonly refer to it) that falls within the visual axis.
All those things are spatial and have nothing to do with time. Besides, it is clear that all those images suffer from the aforementioned exteriority between their elements, and thus they lack the true conti- nuity that characterizes time.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 112 Hegel was right
Again, what the physics and the laymen have is a fantastic image of time, not its concept. No image can be proclaimed the meaning of the word time because all images are spatial. They only need to imagine time to transform it into something which it is not.
The past imagined by the physics is of an illusory nature; it con- sists in a physical fact with its own observable characteristics, but the character of past as such is not empirically observable, not even by a magnifying glass. Even if it was situated in the past, the present or the future, the object would be entirely the same in terms of its empirical features. Therefore, time is an instance that the knowing subject intro- duces into the picture. He takes it not from the empirical data but from the spirit. A determined event belongs to the past for the spirit; and this is so because the spirit remembers it. Rothstein remarked correctly that it is difficult to give meaning to the word past without presupposing memory.
No object has a label that says 'I come from the past'. It is perfectly obvious that 'past' is something that has to be predicated from the present. Consequently, the past has to be contained in the present, and that proposition is not metaphorical but strictly rigorous. That is really a continuum; the multiplicity in unity; the multiplicity that is both iden- tical with and different from the unity. It is not a contiguum or a juxta- position of external elements. Just in the truly and authentic continuity can be time, but it only exists in the spirit. By no means can an event become from the 'past' only because I imagine it placed on the left side of my imaginary screen, or because I imagine it somewhere 'behind'. Both 'left' and 'behind' are spatial contents; they have absolutely noth- ing to do with time. If the past is not present in the present, it is no past at all, given that if it is not present, what we have is exteriority and not continuity .
Likewise, the present character of an object or a fact --in other words, its 'simultaneity with me'-- is not empirically verifiable, even though physics have invested in this proof incalculable endeavors and witty arguments. First, it is obvious that, if the objective data was past or future instead of being simultaneous with me, its empirical features would be exactly the same; hence, its simultaneity with me is not one of its empirical features.
Second, having rejected absolute simultaneity for not being an em- pirical data, the theory of relativity tries in vain to preserve relative simultaneity --i. e. the simultaneity of two close events--, disregarding
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 113
the fact that relative simultaneity is as unverifiable as the former. Actually, physics have to define sooner or later relative simultaneity like this: two events that occur in my proximity are simultaneous if I perceive them simultaneously. The definiendum reappears in the defi- nition, and hence nothing has been defined and we still do not know what simultaneity means. Besides, it is obvious that this definition re- sorts to self-consciousness, for what it really says is the following: the events are simultaneous if my perception of the first event is simulta- neous with my perception of the second event. This definition shows that empirical data cannot build up that dimension of time called si- multaneity, just as it happened before with the past.
But there is still more to this. Whoever says that they are simultane- ous if I perceive them simultaneously and in my proximity, presup- poses necessarily that there is simultaneity between the close event and my perception of it, but that has two mayor drawbacks. The first one is circularity, for a simultaneity that is not being defined is presupposed, and that is exactly what we are trying to define. And the second one is that this same presupposition shows that simultaneity is empirically unverifiable. One tries to prove the simultaneity of two close events by the procedure of perceiving them simultaneously, but that very same procedure needs to assume that the occurring of the event and my perception of it are simultaneous due to their proximity.
The si- multaneity of two events locally close is not verifiable because every verification processes presupposes it.
It is worthy to notice that the real inclusion of the past in the present --which, as we said, is necessary for the past to be past-- is also necessary in order for the present to be present. Bergson already stat- ed that there is no self-consciousness without memory. That is one of the most valuable observations made on this subject. Consciousness of the present is not --as no act of consciousness can possibly be-- an unextended atom of time. It does not occur in a timeless point, for that would not be consciousness of duration, i. e. consciousness of time. If it does not include the past, the present cannot be present. Those unextended instants just exist in the abstract thinking of mathemati- cians, not even in the imagination of mathematicians, since what is unextended is not imaginable; and, of course, those instants are not time, for they suppress continuity and duration, which are indispens- able in order to speak about time. It is very symptomatic that experi- mental psychologists, being astonished and dazzled by the prestige
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 114 Hegel was right
of mathematics, have substituted the term 'psychological present' for the term 'specious present'. The psychological present has duration and, therefore, really includes the past; in contrast, by definition, the mathematical past does not exist, and this is the reason why a men- tality strongly rooted in physics has to conclude that the psychologi- cal present deceives. They want to correct the only present that exists by means of an unreal one. Besides, they are violating the principle according to which nothing that is not subject to experimentation ex- ists. The only present that exists is the psychological present, that is to say, the present of self-consciousness, since the empirical data do not suffice to build up the present, the past or the future.
We have incorporated the sincere recognition of Rothstein to our analysis by stating, without memory, the word past lacks meaning. It is absolutely transcendental to notice that, if memory or remembrances are considered simple reappearances of the experiences we had, we do not obtain thereof the idea of past, for such experiences did not present themselves as from the past because they did not have that feature and are only being repeated exactly as they occurred.
Such memory that can only repeat things is all what the materialist psychologists manage to conceive. But the idea of the past and the existence of time itself remain unexplained. True memory implies an 'I have experienced this', and consequently, self-consciousness, not as a simple 'companion' but as the identity of contents (cfr. III, 5). One requires the spirit, whose experiences have real continuity between themselves, because the spirit consists in its experiences and, as we saw, it is the substance whose accidents are not accidental.
Referring to experimental psychologists, Hegel said something that nowadays would be the solution to much of this discipline's problems. "The incapacity of understanding this universal which is in itself con- crete but remains simple, is what has triggered by some people the belief of preserving peculiar experiences in peculiar fibers or regions (of the brain); according to them, the diverse can only have an isolated spatial existence" (EPW 453). What such psychologists do not manage to understand is that such localized and spatialized experiences would be just like the past of the physics, which could not be experienced as past, and hence is not past.
"The self must be a totality, and yet this totality must be as simple as the self" (EGP 277). The so-called big problem that psychologists face while dealing with time is not that big at all, since, on the one hand, the
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difficulty they come across with stems from the supposed intermediate periods of time during which the spirit does not act --which, by the way, are mistaken, for those periods of time are attributed externally to the soul--; on the other hand, that equals to attribute the soul some- thing that is not time, for the simple reason that the time of physics does not actually exist. Capek says admirably: ". . . forgetting rather than remembering needs an explanation. " (1971, 156).
As a complementary remark, let us just say that most of recent neu- rological researches do not provide favorable results to the so-called thinkers who believe in the storage of experiences in fibers or special regions. Every day we witness more cases in which the extirpation of a zone that was happily declared the monopolizer of certain function only has as its consequence the transitory numbness of the said zone. Ernest D. Gardner comments: "nevertheless, the anatomical distinc- tions are often not clear-cut, the connections between nerve cells are enormously complicated and not at all well understood, functional specificity is often lacking, and species differences in function are hard- ly understood at all. " (EB 24, 832, 1)
Also, in the case of oblivion, emotional inhibitions and personal in- terferences originated in interpersonal relationships have undoubtedly a great bearing. We will soon see that the constituent of the self is in- terpersonality. The following observation of Benton Underwood has a reach that goes beyond biological adaptation:
. . . it is helpful to consider what would happen if memories failed to fade. [. . . ] Without forgetting, adaptive ability would suffer; for example, learned behavior that might have been correct a decade ago may no longer be. Cases are recorded of people who (by ordinary standards) forgot so little that their everyday activities were full of confusion. Thus, forgetting seems to serve the survival of the individual and the species. (EB 23, 947, 1).
We do not even need to deny the 'enagrams' or the recording of ex- periences in certain areas of the nervous tissue. With or without them, what happens is that true memory remains as unexplained as it was before. At the most, the exact repetition of memories would stem from them; but that means, as we previously said, that they do not appear as past memories, for the simple reason that they did not have that character before and, in theory, they are being repeated exactly as they occurred.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 116 Hegel was right
Without an 'I already lived this', there is no past and, consequently, no time. The self identifies itself with its experiences; it is not a substratum different from them; on the contrary, they build up conti- nuity in the strict sense of this word: "the continuity of a universal and a being-with-itself which is not interrupted by the infinitely different limits which are constituted by the impressions and intuitions" (WL I 182). We have seen how in the content of the self all other contents (v. g. substance, being) are included, without this implying that the self ceases to be what it is or that it is interrupted. True memory is of a con- ceptual nature and implies thought and congruency: the imaginary is only a sequel. And Hegel says about this sequel:
"The proceeding of intelligence in the imaginations is both to inte- riorize the immediate and to put itself as perceiving in itself, and to suppress the subjectivity of interiority by freeing itself from itself and from the being in itself in its own exteriority" (EPW, 451).
With respect to the material that comes from empirical impressions, it is obvious that "only in thought does it turn into the concrete im- manence which is the concept" (ibid); only on that level are we aware of it, and, therefore, when it comes to remembering it, that level is the most decisive one.
Therefore, there should not be any misunderstanding about the term memory, when we say that physics strive in vain to make the word time to have a physical meaning, i. e. to make it to have a meaning without the intervention of memory, the self and self-consciousness. They mention, for instance, the lapse that goes between two sunsets. Besides the fact that the words 'lapse' and 'goes' lack empirical mean- ing, (cfr. II, 5) human intelligence has reached the necessary maturity to face, in all its harshness, the fact that two successive sunsets is not an em- pirical data. Furthermore, even if these sunsets were exactly the same in terms of their empirical features, we could say that their being two is not an empirical data. Sensibility cannot perceive numbers. Empiri- cally speaking, each of these dawns is what it is; they exist indepen- dently from each other and have nothing to do between them. Only memory makes them successive, and only there lies time. The time of the physics is not time.
After joyfully rejecting absolute time for being empirically unverifi- able, it is unsettling that physics do not realize that every kind of time is empirically unverifiable, not only the absolute one. They even seem to incur again in the postulation of absolute time when they dump at
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 117
us calculations of millions of years, not only forgetting that the rota- tion of the Earth is not regular and that, in principle, the regularity of the vibrations of cadmium is unverifiable, but also that, if all cosmic movements were ten thousand times faster as they are now --or, in any case, ten thousand times slower--, we would not notice abso- lutely anything, and it follows that those mind-blowing numbers lack all physical meaning just as absolute time does. Besides, the impres- siveness of those numbers depends on the mistaken presupposition of time as a strictly contradictory continuity that does not even exist in space (cfr. supra). The public can peacefully remain calmed before such staggering numbers: the time of physics has nothing to do with real time.
What we said about 'successiveness' can be said of what is 'periodi- cal', for the former enters in the definition of the latter, and that makes it something not empirical. We present this warning because of those careless scientists who believe they can define time by the hands of a watch and avoid Einsteinian circularity (cfr. II, 5) by saying: that a watch is an 'isolated system that runs periodically'. Perhaps circularity is avoided, but one does thereby without empiricity as well, for with- out the intervention of memory and self-consciousness it is impossible to provide meaning to the word periodicity.
7. interSubjectivity
We will now proceed to make explicit the third characterization of spirit, which was lying underneath the two former ones from the very start: intersubjectivity --which is, essentially, ethicity.
If, as we have seen, the subject consists in the awareness of the self, in that mental and ideal content called self-consciousness, then intersub- jectivity is essentially there from the very beginning, for it is obvious that a child does not manage to call himself a 'I', he does not gain awareness of his self --and thus, he is unable to create it for the first time-- until his mother (or somebody else) addresses him in such a way that, by personalizing him, he comes to realize that he is a person; analogously, by giving him responsibilities, he gradually becomes a responsible subject. In the awareness of the self that is being formed the awareness of the other is present in such a way that they are not only inseparable: they stand, in fact, in such a degree of mutual penetration
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 118 Hegel was right
that the child has awareness of himself by having awareness of other, and this intersubjective constitution of self-consciousness is always constant, because the consciousness of one's own identity is conscious- ness of one's own distinction with respect to others, and hence it is consciousness of others. Therefore, self-consciousness (i. e. the self) and the consciousness I have others nourish one another; they make each other exist, and, truly, one is the reason of being of the other. It follows from this that his third characterization does not pretend to point out an extrinsic cause of the self but rather its very being and its intrinsic constituent. Now, this consciousness of the others --which makes my self-consciousness-- is of an eminently ethical character. Its content is the following: I do not exist alone; the others also exist. The others are subjects --not objects-- just like I am one; I cannot confuse them with things that can be treated as means, because they are self-conscious- nesses just as me.
If this was not the content of the consciousness I have of the others, if it did not make me responsible, if it was not an exigency that guides my freedom by constituting it, it would not generate self-determi- nation and, therefore, it would not cause a self, for we saw before (III, 2) that, essentially, the self makes itself what it is. To this exigen- cy or imperative the self can answer in very different ways, in very different degrees of consent, in very different degrees of responsi- bility, but by answering to that exigency it provides itself with its own determinations. Furthermore, it conforms right from the start the mass of which moral substance is constituted --but that, of course, is only a metaphor, since we have seen that there is not a substratum. The self is not a material rock: its only real consistency is the mental and ideal content called self-consciousness, as well as the consciousness I have not only of my existence but of the existence of the others --which, most certainly, is the very moral content.
Let us not forget what we previously discussed (III 5). We said, following Kant, that there cannot be consciousness without self- consciousness. And we just added that there cannot be conscience without self-conscience. This is one of the most penetrating discover- ies; it is dated X, b. C. --as we will later see (VI, 1)-- and was made by an anonymous thinker who is called the Yahvist by the exegetes. Hegel takes his discovery extremely seriously.
The Hegelian formulations of our third characterization of spirit en- rich and complement our exposition. This thesis plays a fundamental
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 119
role in the philosophy of Hegel, as it has been noticed by both his smartest (Laure, Mure, Stace), and his superficial (Hyppolite, Koje`ve, etcetera) commentators.
"Without a thou, the self is impossible" (JS 378).
It is obvious that our objectors --as innocent as only they can be-- suppose that time is continuous. Newton would also like to capture such
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 108 Hegel was right
continuity when he says that time 'flows' and that it is 'mathematical'. Now, in the sense that Newton and our objectors conceive it, conti- nuity is not a data of our psychological or empirical experience. It could not be the former case, because no one can be incessantly having acts of self-consciousness, but it could not be the latter either, because even if we gratuitously suppose that physical time is continuous, our per- ception of time is not uninterrupted: no one can be carrying out acts of perception incessantly.
In our century something both curious and incongruent has hap- pened: even though physics have rejected absolute time for not being an empirical data, they still believe in a relative time that possesses the same dubious continuity which is not and cannot be an empirical data. And they do exactly the same thing in regard of absolute and relative space.
The highly dubious continuity we have alluded to is the mathemati- cal one. Following Bergson, Capek has very well remarked that the mathematical is a "disguised discontinuity" (1973, 321), for it supposes the existence of several different units --called 'points' in the case of space and time--; one wants them to yield the impression of continu- ity because one thinks of them as standing in a juxtaposition, but in fact they are external from one another. That is called contiguity, not continuity.
As Poincare? noticed, one demands a strong nexus between the ele- ments of the continuum for that is what really makes it a whole; in the real continuity, the point has no priority over the line, but rather the line has priority over the point. According to its true concept, the continuum is unity in multiplicity; but in mathematical continuity "only the multi- plicity subsists; the unity has disappeared. " (1909, 30)
Hegel had observed this long time ago: "To the imagination that lacks the concept, continuity easily transforms into juxtaposition, which is an extrinsic relation of the units between themselves, in which each unity preserves its absolute discontinuity and exclusion" (WL I 181).
The inescapable conclusion --a conclusion which requires an intel- lectual honesty of which physics commonly lack-- is that the time and the space of the physics are contradictory entities:
It is not contradictory in imagination that one puts points in space, mo- ments in the continuous time or the now of time within continuity length (day, year), but its concept is contradictory. The identity within itself means
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Science and Literature 109
absolute continuation, extinction of all distinction, of the negative, of all the being-on its-own; on the other hand, the point is the pure being-on-its-own, the absolute distinguishing itself and suppression of all identity and coher- ence with others. Now, both things are affirmed as one in space and time; therefore, space and time are contradictions (GP I 307).
"The space is within itself the contradiction of the indifferent exte- riority and the continuity without distinction" (EPW 260).
Notice well that this is not only about absolute time and space. We are not rejecting certain entities on the grounds that they cannot be made objects of our experience. This is much more about all sorts of space and time in Physics. What Hegel demonstrated was that space and time in Physics are contradictory in their very same concept. In the name of this strictly contradictory time, the objection was raised against the spirit as act of self-consciousness and self-determination.
Since mathematical continuity is not true continuity, it is now im- portant to emphasize that the time of the physics is not time.
Jerome Rothstein is very brave to admit that the empirical data do not suffice to build up time. He explicitly states the following: "It is hard to give any sense at all to the term 'past' without presupposing memory or a record of some kind" (Bastin, 1971, 293). Resorting to memory is to witness the reflection of the subject upon himself, that is to say, to wit- ness self-consciousness; so we are in the true time, identified with our self. In contrast, the alluded time of the physical world is simply not time. I don't know why it has taken so long for an exceptional physic like Rothstein to realize that, since Hegel had already demonstrated this with absolute clarity. In regard to the three dimensions of time, Hegel explicitly made this remark. "In addition, one cannot distinguish in nature [. . . ] such distinctions; they are only necessary in the concep- tion of the subject, in memory, fear or hope" (EPW 259 A). This is why Hegel said that, sooner or later, the meaning of all concepts consist in "vital and spiritual situations" (WL I 335).
The absolute lack of time that characterizes the time of physics, instead of diminishing, has been accentuated with the theory of rela- tivity: the expression 'space-time' denotes this, for the four-dimension- al space of Minkowski is simply space (not time), but physics have the whim of calling it so. It happens just what we saw (II 5) with decretory definitions: what they do is to stick to something different and leave time aside.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 110 Hegel was right
Eddington expresses this naively: "In the four-dimensional world we shall accordingly regard 1 second as the equivalent of 300,000 ki- lometres, and measure lengths and times in seconds and kilometres indiscriminately" (1978, 46).
Their procedure is very simple: since a six inches bomb irrigates one hectare of wheat, they take 'wheat' as a synonym of 'water' in- discriminately .
A more lucid physic, Herbert Dingle, has expressed this clearly:
It is therefore because of our voluntary choice of measuring processes that we can speak of the 'union' of space and time into 'space-time'. This has nothing to do with any philosophical notions of space and time in themselves; it is a consequence of the wisdom of making sure that, after expressing motion in terms of space and time, the measurement of time shall depend on the measurement of space. Only on this account is it possible, as Minkowski did, to represent the time-co-ordinate as a fourth space-co-ordinate and describe motion geometrically as a track in a four- dimensional continuum. (Schilpp, ed. , II 1970, 543s).
Although they intend to preserve relative time and evade absolute time, the physics of our century fail in fact to recognize time itself --something that also happened in classical physics with the pos- tulation of an absolute time. This, of course, should not surprise us because time is not something physical.
Mathematical time is not time because --as Hegel demonstrated-- it lacks true continuity. We will later study real continuity as real time. Following a very different path, physics introduced an 'infinite divisibil- ity', which seemed to be a proper feature of space, but the quantum of Planck has demonstrated that it does not even exist in space.
According to the experimental discoveries of quantum physics, it is false that the material reality is infinitely divisible. If we start frac- tioning the material, we will find sooner or later something that is not further divisible. But it surprises me that physics had to wait for Planck, since Hegel demonstrated this in the text we quoted before (GP I 307): it is contradictory not only that time consists of temporal points, but also that space consists of spatial points. In addition, it is evident that something extended cannot be the result of unextended elements.
By means of a dilemma whose second branch derives into a new di- lemma, it is easy to explain that, whoever affirms the infinite divisibility
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of space and rejects the quanta, forcefully affirms that the ulterior com- ponents of space are unextended points. The dilemma is the following one: the ulterior components are either divisible or indivisible. And if they are indivisible, they must necessarily be either extended (quanta) or unextended (points).
We cannot choose the first branch of the dilemma, for if they are divisible they cannot be the ulterior components; they can only be the resulting segments of the last division.
But if we say they are divisible, we would necessarily have to choose between extended or unextended ulterior components. Therefore, whoever rejects the quanta affirms that the ulterior components are points.
It is evident, however, that the sum of unextended elements cannot render something extended. Even before Planck's experiments, the only thing logically sustainable was that the ulterior components of space were quanta i. e. indivisible extended elements. Mathematical space --meaning a space that is infinitely divisible-- is a contradiction of which Hegel timely warned us. Now, on the grounds of the spurious identification of space and time, physics always presented the image of an infinitely divisible time in substitution of a continuous time which is, as we will later see, the only true one. Physics incurred and keeps incurring in two big mistakes: first, to confuse time with space; second, to attribute an infinite divisibility to time that even space lacks.
It is of primal importance to notice that the confusion of space and time is a widespread epidemic: the layman does not have the concept of time. This does not wash away the blame of physics, since the pur- pose of science is not to reaffirm indefinitely the false beliefs of common people. Some figure that time is a fluid, as we saw Newton did; but a fluid is something spatial; evidently, they are imagining themselves being right at the side of a river, which is something spatial: but none of that can be comprised in the concept of time. Others --and this occurs more often-- imagine a line that goes all across the imaginary visual field from one end to the other; they call the left segment 'past' and the right segment 'future'; they call 'present' a very little segment (or point, as they commonly refer to it) that falls within the visual axis.
All those things are spatial and have nothing to do with time. Besides, it is clear that all those images suffer from the aforementioned exteriority between their elements, and thus they lack the true conti- nuity that characterizes time.
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Again, what the physics and the laymen have is a fantastic image of time, not its concept. No image can be proclaimed the meaning of the word time because all images are spatial. They only need to imagine time to transform it into something which it is not.
The past imagined by the physics is of an illusory nature; it con- sists in a physical fact with its own observable characteristics, but the character of past as such is not empirically observable, not even by a magnifying glass. Even if it was situated in the past, the present or the future, the object would be entirely the same in terms of its empirical features. Therefore, time is an instance that the knowing subject intro- duces into the picture. He takes it not from the empirical data but from the spirit. A determined event belongs to the past for the spirit; and this is so because the spirit remembers it. Rothstein remarked correctly that it is difficult to give meaning to the word past without presupposing memory.
No object has a label that says 'I come from the past'. It is perfectly obvious that 'past' is something that has to be predicated from the present. Consequently, the past has to be contained in the present, and that proposition is not metaphorical but strictly rigorous. That is really a continuum; the multiplicity in unity; the multiplicity that is both iden- tical with and different from the unity. It is not a contiguum or a juxta- position of external elements. Just in the truly and authentic continuity can be time, but it only exists in the spirit. By no means can an event become from the 'past' only because I imagine it placed on the left side of my imaginary screen, or because I imagine it somewhere 'behind'. Both 'left' and 'behind' are spatial contents; they have absolutely noth- ing to do with time. If the past is not present in the present, it is no past at all, given that if it is not present, what we have is exteriority and not continuity .
Likewise, the present character of an object or a fact --in other words, its 'simultaneity with me'-- is not empirically verifiable, even though physics have invested in this proof incalculable endeavors and witty arguments. First, it is obvious that, if the objective data was past or future instead of being simultaneous with me, its empirical features would be exactly the same; hence, its simultaneity with me is not one of its empirical features.
Second, having rejected absolute simultaneity for not being an em- pirical data, the theory of relativity tries in vain to preserve relative simultaneity --i. e. the simultaneity of two close events--, disregarding
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the fact that relative simultaneity is as unverifiable as the former. Actually, physics have to define sooner or later relative simultaneity like this: two events that occur in my proximity are simultaneous if I perceive them simultaneously. The definiendum reappears in the defi- nition, and hence nothing has been defined and we still do not know what simultaneity means. Besides, it is obvious that this definition re- sorts to self-consciousness, for what it really says is the following: the events are simultaneous if my perception of the first event is simulta- neous with my perception of the second event. This definition shows that empirical data cannot build up that dimension of time called si- multaneity, just as it happened before with the past.
But there is still more to this. Whoever says that they are simultane- ous if I perceive them simultaneously and in my proximity, presup- poses necessarily that there is simultaneity between the close event and my perception of it, but that has two mayor drawbacks. The first one is circularity, for a simultaneity that is not being defined is presupposed, and that is exactly what we are trying to define. And the second one is that this same presupposition shows that simultaneity is empirically unverifiable. One tries to prove the simultaneity of two close events by the procedure of perceiving them simultaneously, but that very same procedure needs to assume that the occurring of the event and my perception of it are simultaneous due to their proximity.
The si- multaneity of two events locally close is not verifiable because every verification processes presupposes it.
It is worthy to notice that the real inclusion of the past in the present --which, as we said, is necessary for the past to be past-- is also necessary in order for the present to be present. Bergson already stat- ed that there is no self-consciousness without memory. That is one of the most valuable observations made on this subject. Consciousness of the present is not --as no act of consciousness can possibly be-- an unextended atom of time. It does not occur in a timeless point, for that would not be consciousness of duration, i. e. consciousness of time. If it does not include the past, the present cannot be present. Those unextended instants just exist in the abstract thinking of mathemati- cians, not even in the imagination of mathematicians, since what is unextended is not imaginable; and, of course, those instants are not time, for they suppress continuity and duration, which are indispens- able in order to speak about time. It is very symptomatic that experi- mental psychologists, being astonished and dazzled by the prestige
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of mathematics, have substituted the term 'psychological present' for the term 'specious present'. The psychological present has duration and, therefore, really includes the past; in contrast, by definition, the mathematical past does not exist, and this is the reason why a men- tality strongly rooted in physics has to conclude that the psychologi- cal present deceives. They want to correct the only present that exists by means of an unreal one. Besides, they are violating the principle according to which nothing that is not subject to experimentation ex- ists. The only present that exists is the psychological present, that is to say, the present of self-consciousness, since the empirical data do not suffice to build up the present, the past or the future.
We have incorporated the sincere recognition of Rothstein to our analysis by stating, without memory, the word past lacks meaning. It is absolutely transcendental to notice that, if memory or remembrances are considered simple reappearances of the experiences we had, we do not obtain thereof the idea of past, for such experiences did not present themselves as from the past because they did not have that feature and are only being repeated exactly as they occurred.
Such memory that can only repeat things is all what the materialist psychologists manage to conceive. But the idea of the past and the existence of time itself remain unexplained. True memory implies an 'I have experienced this', and consequently, self-consciousness, not as a simple 'companion' but as the identity of contents (cfr. III, 5). One requires the spirit, whose experiences have real continuity between themselves, because the spirit consists in its experiences and, as we saw, it is the substance whose accidents are not accidental.
Referring to experimental psychologists, Hegel said something that nowadays would be the solution to much of this discipline's problems. "The incapacity of understanding this universal which is in itself con- crete but remains simple, is what has triggered by some people the belief of preserving peculiar experiences in peculiar fibers or regions (of the brain); according to them, the diverse can only have an isolated spatial existence" (EPW 453). What such psychologists do not manage to understand is that such localized and spatialized experiences would be just like the past of the physics, which could not be experienced as past, and hence is not past.
"The self must be a totality, and yet this totality must be as simple as the self" (EGP 277). The so-called big problem that psychologists face while dealing with time is not that big at all, since, on the one hand, the
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difficulty they come across with stems from the supposed intermediate periods of time during which the spirit does not act --which, by the way, are mistaken, for those periods of time are attributed externally to the soul--; on the other hand, that equals to attribute the soul some- thing that is not time, for the simple reason that the time of physics does not actually exist. Capek says admirably: ". . . forgetting rather than remembering needs an explanation. " (1971, 156).
As a complementary remark, let us just say that most of recent neu- rological researches do not provide favorable results to the so-called thinkers who believe in the storage of experiences in fibers or special regions. Every day we witness more cases in which the extirpation of a zone that was happily declared the monopolizer of certain function only has as its consequence the transitory numbness of the said zone. Ernest D. Gardner comments: "nevertheless, the anatomical distinc- tions are often not clear-cut, the connections between nerve cells are enormously complicated and not at all well understood, functional specificity is often lacking, and species differences in function are hard- ly understood at all. " (EB 24, 832, 1)
Also, in the case of oblivion, emotional inhibitions and personal in- terferences originated in interpersonal relationships have undoubtedly a great bearing. We will soon see that the constituent of the self is in- terpersonality. The following observation of Benton Underwood has a reach that goes beyond biological adaptation:
. . . it is helpful to consider what would happen if memories failed to fade. [. . . ] Without forgetting, adaptive ability would suffer; for example, learned behavior that might have been correct a decade ago may no longer be. Cases are recorded of people who (by ordinary standards) forgot so little that their everyday activities were full of confusion. Thus, forgetting seems to serve the survival of the individual and the species. (EB 23, 947, 1).
We do not even need to deny the 'enagrams' or the recording of ex- periences in certain areas of the nervous tissue. With or without them, what happens is that true memory remains as unexplained as it was before. At the most, the exact repetition of memories would stem from them; but that means, as we previously said, that they do not appear as past memories, for the simple reason that they did not have that character before and, in theory, they are being repeated exactly as they occurred.
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Without an 'I already lived this', there is no past and, consequently, no time. The self identifies itself with its experiences; it is not a substratum different from them; on the contrary, they build up conti- nuity in the strict sense of this word: "the continuity of a universal and a being-with-itself which is not interrupted by the infinitely different limits which are constituted by the impressions and intuitions" (WL I 182). We have seen how in the content of the self all other contents (v. g. substance, being) are included, without this implying that the self ceases to be what it is or that it is interrupted. True memory is of a con- ceptual nature and implies thought and congruency: the imaginary is only a sequel. And Hegel says about this sequel:
"The proceeding of intelligence in the imaginations is both to inte- riorize the immediate and to put itself as perceiving in itself, and to suppress the subjectivity of interiority by freeing itself from itself and from the being in itself in its own exteriority" (EPW, 451).
With respect to the material that comes from empirical impressions, it is obvious that "only in thought does it turn into the concrete im- manence which is the concept" (ibid); only on that level are we aware of it, and, therefore, when it comes to remembering it, that level is the most decisive one.
Therefore, there should not be any misunderstanding about the term memory, when we say that physics strive in vain to make the word time to have a physical meaning, i. e. to make it to have a meaning without the intervention of memory, the self and self-consciousness. They mention, for instance, the lapse that goes between two sunsets. Besides the fact that the words 'lapse' and 'goes' lack empirical mean- ing, (cfr. II, 5) human intelligence has reached the necessary maturity to face, in all its harshness, the fact that two successive sunsets is not an em- pirical data. Furthermore, even if these sunsets were exactly the same in terms of their empirical features, we could say that their being two is not an empirical data. Sensibility cannot perceive numbers. Empiri- cally speaking, each of these dawns is what it is; they exist indepen- dently from each other and have nothing to do between them. Only memory makes them successive, and only there lies time. The time of the physics is not time.
After joyfully rejecting absolute time for being empirically unverifi- able, it is unsettling that physics do not realize that every kind of time is empirically unverifiable, not only the absolute one. They even seem to incur again in the postulation of absolute time when they dump at
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us calculations of millions of years, not only forgetting that the rota- tion of the Earth is not regular and that, in principle, the regularity of the vibrations of cadmium is unverifiable, but also that, if all cosmic movements were ten thousand times faster as they are now --or, in any case, ten thousand times slower--, we would not notice abso- lutely anything, and it follows that those mind-blowing numbers lack all physical meaning just as absolute time does. Besides, the impres- siveness of those numbers depends on the mistaken presupposition of time as a strictly contradictory continuity that does not even exist in space (cfr. supra). The public can peacefully remain calmed before such staggering numbers: the time of physics has nothing to do with real time.
What we said about 'successiveness' can be said of what is 'periodi- cal', for the former enters in the definition of the latter, and that makes it something not empirical. We present this warning because of those careless scientists who believe they can define time by the hands of a watch and avoid Einsteinian circularity (cfr. II, 5) by saying: that a watch is an 'isolated system that runs periodically'. Perhaps circularity is avoided, but one does thereby without empiricity as well, for with- out the intervention of memory and self-consciousness it is impossible to provide meaning to the word periodicity.
7. interSubjectivity
We will now proceed to make explicit the third characterization of spirit, which was lying underneath the two former ones from the very start: intersubjectivity --which is, essentially, ethicity.
If, as we have seen, the subject consists in the awareness of the self, in that mental and ideal content called self-consciousness, then intersub- jectivity is essentially there from the very beginning, for it is obvious that a child does not manage to call himself a 'I', he does not gain awareness of his self --and thus, he is unable to create it for the first time-- until his mother (or somebody else) addresses him in such a way that, by personalizing him, he comes to realize that he is a person; analogously, by giving him responsibilities, he gradually becomes a responsible subject. In the awareness of the self that is being formed the awareness of the other is present in such a way that they are not only inseparable: they stand, in fact, in such a degree of mutual penetration
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that the child has awareness of himself by having awareness of other, and this intersubjective constitution of self-consciousness is always constant, because the consciousness of one's own identity is conscious- ness of one's own distinction with respect to others, and hence it is consciousness of others. Therefore, self-consciousness (i. e. the self) and the consciousness I have others nourish one another; they make each other exist, and, truly, one is the reason of being of the other. It follows from this that his third characterization does not pretend to point out an extrinsic cause of the self but rather its very being and its intrinsic constituent. Now, this consciousness of the others --which makes my self-consciousness-- is of an eminently ethical character. Its content is the following: I do not exist alone; the others also exist. The others are subjects --not objects-- just like I am one; I cannot confuse them with things that can be treated as means, because they are self-conscious- nesses just as me.
If this was not the content of the consciousness I have of the others, if it did not make me responsible, if it was not an exigency that guides my freedom by constituting it, it would not generate self-determi- nation and, therefore, it would not cause a self, for we saw before (III, 2) that, essentially, the self makes itself what it is. To this exigen- cy or imperative the self can answer in very different ways, in very different degrees of consent, in very different degrees of responsi- bility, but by answering to that exigency it provides itself with its own determinations. Furthermore, it conforms right from the start the mass of which moral substance is constituted --but that, of course, is only a metaphor, since we have seen that there is not a substratum. The self is not a material rock: its only real consistency is the mental and ideal content called self-consciousness, as well as the consciousness I have not only of my existence but of the existence of the others --which, most certainly, is the very moral content.
Let us not forget what we previously discussed (III 5). We said, following Kant, that there cannot be consciousness without self- consciousness. And we just added that there cannot be conscience without self-conscience. This is one of the most penetrating discover- ies; it is dated X, b. C. --as we will later see (VI, 1)-- and was made by an anonymous thinker who is called the Yahvist by the exegetes. Hegel takes his discovery extremely seriously.
The Hegelian formulations of our third characterization of spirit en- rich and complement our exposition. This thesis plays a fundamental
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role in the philosophy of Hegel, as it has been noticed by both his smartest (Laure, Mure, Stace), and his superficial (Hyppolite, Koje`ve, etcetera) commentators.
"Without a thou, the self is impossible" (JS 378).
